
Class 


Isz 


Book 




Oop)TigIit]f 





COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO • DALLAS 
ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO 

MACMILLAN & CO., Limited 

LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA 
MELBOURNE 

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. 

TORONTO 



THE 
WAR FOR THE WORLD 



BY 
ISRAEL ZANGWILL 

AUTHOR OF " ITALIAN FANTASIES," " CHILDREN OF 
THE GHETTO," ETC. 



CHANCELLOR OF GOTHA: 
Once Alba's vanquished, Europe's at our feet. 
And have we Europe then the world is ours." 

COUNT FRITHIOF: 
"What shall it profit a race to gain the 
world and lose its soul ? " 

" THE WAR GOD " (ACT I.) 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
1916 

All rights reserved 






Copyright, 1915 
By ISRAEL ZANGWILL 



Copyright, 1915 
THE METROPOLITAN MAGAZINE COMPANY 



Copyright, 1916 

By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

Set up and electrotyped. Published July, 1916. 



JUL 27I9I6 
©CI.A433866 






TO 

THE ENGLISHMAN 

Too modest to be named 

Too unassuming to question his government's wisdom or 

righteousness 

who abandoning all worldly and with no other-worldly hopes 

went to the front 

as simply as in the daily 

war for the world 

and returned crippled and uncomplaining save of his 

uselessness to his country 

this book — of which he might not wholly approve — 

is — without permission but with admiring affection — 

DEDICATED. 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Some Prognostications and a Preface, with an Apologia 

for not Being Pro-German i 

The War Devil 79 

Lament 88 

Paradise Lost 91 

The Shadows of Society 96 

The Next War 97 

Arms and the Man 104 

The Ruined Romantics in 

On the Coast 124 

The Gods of Germany 125 

Militarism, British and Prussian 135 

Arms and the Band 141 

The Model Monster 147 

Some Apologists for Germany 154 

The Kaiser at the Judgment Bar 170 

The War and the Drama 175 

The Two Empires 195 

The Levity of War-Politics 196 

The Place of Peace 211 

The Military Pacifists 213 

The Absurd Side of Alliances 221 

The War for the Words 228 

Novelists and the War 233 

Walking in War-Time '. 240 

Appendix 248 

On Catching Up a Lie 250 

Patriotism and Percentage 255 

The War and the Churches 265 

Written by a Jew this Christmas Eve 277 

vii 



Ylll CONTEXTS 

PAGE 

Mr. Morel and the Congo 278 

The Awkward Age of the Women's Movement 287 

The Militant Suffragists 298 

Prologue for a Women's Theatre 319 

The War and the Women 321 

(1) Woman as Woreer 321 

(2) Woman as Fighter 330 

(3) Woman as Peacemaker 337 

Wake Up. Parliament ! 344 

For Small Mercies 357 

Rosy Russia 358 

At the Congress 369 

The Story of the Steam-Roller 371 

Bezalel 373 

The War and the Jews 374 

"russla and the jews " 4°5 

(Two Letters to the Nation.) 

On the Death of Herzl 414 

The Jewish Factor ln the War and the Settlement 415 

Two Letters to "The Times " 449 

Envoi: Oliver Singing 455 



THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 



SOME PROGNOSTICATIONS AND A PREFACE 
WITH AN APOLOGIA FOR NOT BEING PRO- 
GERMAN 

"This war is in reality a life and death struggle between two forms 
of State, one retrograde and no longer capable, the other far advanced 
and capable of the most powerful activities. Either Germany with 
its organization and ideas will be destroyed in this war, or England, 
if it is to live at all, must rebuild its institutions and introduce that 
Continental form of State of which Germany is the most shining 
example." — Professor Eduard Meyer. 

"Because these (German aims and methods) have a loathy side, 
and because these endanger our commerce, our institutions, our very 
existence, we must not in our perfectly legitimate anger ignore the 
fact that they could not have given Germany her present strength 
without much good being mixed with the evil." — Morning Post, 8th 
February, 1916. 

"Fight the Germans like the Germans." — Mr. Austin Harrison. 



In these dark and unbalanced days, when mass-psychol- 
ogy can ill support any contradiction of the prevailing 
temper, it is necessary, I am aware, for an obdurate Anti- 
German like myself to walk somewhat gingerly. But if 
I am unable to surrender myself to the current idolatry of 
German State-institutions, and the contagion of Prussian 
militarism; if the enthusiasm for German organization 
leaves me cold, and the scrapping of Magna Charta hot; 
if I have shown in so much of my work— as that popular 
Labor-organ, the Herald, complains — too great a bias 



2 SOME PROGNOSTICATIONS AND A PREFACE 

against Germany, and ignored the cultural and socialistic 
sides of her State-concept, something must be allowed in 
extenuation to the force of early impressions. For it so 
happened that my very first experience of Germany was 
one calculated to quicken my instinctive loathing for the 
Bismarckized State, and to crystallize my vague intuitions 
of the coming clash between British and German State- 
concepts in a war for the world. 

II 

I was returning to England from Italy with a through 
ticket via the Netherlands when suddenly from the corridor 
of the train appeared a new conductor, demanding my 
Fakrkarte. With a weary sigh — for I had shown it so often 
and would have to show it so often again before reaching 
London — I produced the be-clipped and mutilated pass 
that had begun life as a beautiful Biglietto. Alas! its con- 
ductor-crushing career seemed over. For my official was 
still aggressive. Ensued a duologue in German. 

"But where is your seat-ticket?" 

"This is it." 

"No! You have no right to be sitting here without a 
seat- ticket ! " 

"I have been sitting here since Rome." 

"You are not in Italy now, you are in Germany." (I 
began to feel it was indeed so.) "You must pay two marks 
for your place." 

"But my ticket shows I have paid all the way to London." 

"Nevertheless in Germany you must pay for your 
seat." 

"But I must sit somewhere." 

"And every seat must be paid for." 

I believed his claim now, but I resented his manner. 



WITH AN APOLOGIA FOR NOT BEING PRO-GERMAN 3 

"Very well then— I will stand." 

"Es ist verboten — the seats must be sat on." 

"Then I will stand in the corridor." And I walked 
haughtily without. He was unimpressed. 

"You cannot stand in the corridor. Es ist verboten. 
Either you pay for your seat or you leave the train." 

"That is nonsense — on arriving at Munich I will pay, if 
I am assured the charge is correct." 

"You will not get to Munich — I shall put you out at 
the next station." 

"You cannot do that. Es ist verboten." 

He glowered. "I will put you out at the next station." 

"But my luggage is in the van." 

"That is your look-out." 

And deliberately placing in his wallet my elaborate and 
expensive ticket, which he had been holding in his hand, 
he closed the bag with the snap of a steel trap. 

I felt caught in it! To be put down at a wayside German 
station, without ticket, luggage, or adequate funds, with 
no remedy but an action for recovery against the railway 
company, which would at the best detain me weeks in 
Germany — it was not an alluring prospect. Suddenly 
over the window of the carriage I perceived the painted 
words — sinister as the inscription over the gate of Dante's 
Hell: "For Eight Officers." 

So the Railway Company was then either the German 
Government, or already part of its war-organization! I 
paid the two marks. 

Ill 

Even Switzerland, I thought during a melodramatic 
episode at Basle station in the small hours, was beginning 
to be infected with Berlin Bumbledom. It was an August 
night, unbearably sultry, and a crowd of passengers chang- 



4 SOME PROGNOSTICATIONS AND A PREFACE 

ing their train were stuffed into a little waiting room, there 
to pass an hour or so. I left it and strolled into the spacious 
station, drawing a breath of relief. 

"Where are you going?" A dread being in uniform 
blocked my way. 

"To wait on the platform for my train," I replied in my 
best Swiss-German. 

"You cannot wait on the platform. Es ist verboten." 

"Why?" 

"Because if you did, others would go there." 

"And why should they not?" 

"Because then those who were there would get into the 
train first." 

"And why not? First come, first served." 

"Es ist verboten! There would be a crowd on the plat- 
form." 

"Better than a crowd in that stifling room. I cannot 
stay there." 

"You must." 

"I will not. The railway company is my servant. I am 
not its servant." 

Sensation. He went away and returned with a still 
more ornamented official, who however equally failed to 
move me — at least by his words. The plot thickened. 
A file of soldiers arrived with fixed bayonets, and clock- 
work attitudes. But other passengers gathered round and 
endorsed my view of the Black Hole of Basle. Before my 
free-born defiance officialdom was paralyzed — the protest 
was apparently unprecedented in the history of the station. 

But it seemed to me intolerable that Switzerland should 
go the way of Prussia. There was a deadlock, as in the 
trenches of Flanders. At this moment a third official came 
up — in a somewhat different style of decoration and also 
of a more gentlemanly cast. 4 He enquired into the cause 



WITH AN APOLOGIA FOR NOT BEING PRO-GERMAN 5 

of the disturbance and having heard both sides, he turned 
to me and said politely: "I should strongly advise you, 
mein Herr, not to resist, or there will be very considerable 
trouble." 

I was disappointed and outraged: "What!" I cried in 
wilfully dramatic accents. "In Switzerland, which we in 
England have always looked upon as the land par excellence 
of Freedom!" 

"This is not my land," explained the gentlemanly Swiss. 
"This is the German part of the station." 

I understood. 

But this was not the end, for as I refused to return to 
the room even though it was Prussian, porters appeared 
with a long rope, with which a space was roped off in the 
station immediately outside the asphyxiating little room, 
and here, penned like cattle at market, we stood in the 
dead of night till our Prussian train, punctual to the 
second, rolled obediently into its appointed platform. 

IV 

Our treatment enabled me to appreciate more vividly 
the callous handling of the thousands of poor Jews whom 
for many years it was a function of an organization over 
which I presided, to emigrate via Germany. Constant 
and perennial were the complaints of cruelty both at the 
German frontier stations and on board the German steam- 
ers. Once the brutality was so palpable that I actually 
succeeded in getting a couple of naval officers dismissed. 
But as a rule it was less acts of tyranny than a pervasive 
atmosphere of harshness and contempt, difficult to cope 
with, but embittering the lot of the steerage passengers, 
already suffering sufficiently from exile, poverty and sea- 
sickness. To dispense with the German lines in favor for 



6 SOME PROGNOSTICATIONS AND A PREFACE 

example of Dutch, was impossible, because Germany 
simply forbade emigrants to pass through her territory 
unless provided with sailing-tickets for her vessels. And 
this is the Germany that prates of the freedom of the seas! 
The outbreak of hostilities between our respective coun- 
tries served to suspend them between my organization 
and a great German Shipping Company which was vainly 
demanding an apology from our Russian representative 
for his outspoken statements concerning the treatment of 
emigrants. The Chairman with whom I had been in con- 
troversial correspondence blossomed out into a Colonel of 
the famous Prussian Guard. That seemed to throw a back- 
light on the whole business. 



Even as an author I have suffered from the Germans, for 
one of the greatest tortures of my lif e was reading the proofs 
of my novels in German. When I reflect that my translator 
was a popular novelist who has since become famous by his 
vigorous verse against England, I cannot help suspecting 
that his translation was a premature act of war. His 
rendering of a nursery reference to "Baby Bunting " I have 
never forgotten. It was turned into "Babys Flagge." 
Such is the insidious effect of Militarismus. 

Socially too my Teutonic experiences have not been cap- 
tivating. The beer-regurgitating face-slashed student of the 
Kneipe and the duelling ground has always seemed to me a 
barbarian type of young man : my esurient and lip-smacking 
neighbors at Teutonic tables d'hote have never impressed 
me as the latest models of refinement; nor have I been over- 
come by the Kultur of the tourists who, with opera-glasses 
slung across their portly bosoms, ejaculate their monotonous 
"Wunderschon!" before every mountain or miniature. 



WITH AN APOLOGIA FOR NOT BEING PRO-GERMAN 7 

I have loved the old towns and the life at Munich and Dres- 
den but I have never been at ease in the Zion of the German 
salon, with its heavy spirit-constricting furniture. And one 
of the greatest shocks I ever received in a drawing-room 
was when Wagner's stepdaughter (the Countess Gravina) 
imparted to me that Jesus was not born into my race but 
was a pure Aryan. I was not then aware of the copious 
literature on the subject with its humorless demonstra- 
tion that the founder of Christianity was a German. Of 
course the Countess was merely echoing her relative, 
Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who remarks urbanely: 
"Whoever maintains that Christ was a Jew is either ig- 
norant or a liar." She may even have agreed with 
Herr Max Bewer that Jesus was of Rhenish- Westphalian 
origin. 1 

So if the readers of the Morning Post find me in as im- 
perfect affinity with the Germans as Charles Lamb was with 
the Jews, they will know it is not from mere eccentricity or 
conservatism, but from a reasonable antipathy to spiritual 
swagger and mediaeval militarism, accompanied by bump- 
tiousness and cruelty. Repugnance to Prussianism is too 
inracinated in my breast to be uprooted merely because the 
German machine has ground out a few victories. Rather 
do I feel like Herbert Spencer at the Athenaeum Club, 
when having inadvertently challenged a young billiard- 
champion, he remarked solemnly after his astonishing lick- 
ing: "Young man! To play billiards as I do shows a sensible 
care for recreation, but to play billiards as you do argues 
a great deal of wasted time." The German machine, ac- 
cording to Dr. Sadler, who seems not far from admiring 
it, cannot be imitated in parts: it works only as a whole. 

1 A new book, Die Erde und unsere Ahnen, proves that Moses was born in 
the Harz mountains, Jerusalem was the North German town of Goslar 
and Solomon's Temple stood on the Brocken Mountain. 



8 SOME PROGNOSTICATIONS AND A PREFACE 

And I must firmly refuse to have Prussia at any price, 
even at the risk of being considered an early Edwardian. 

VI 

Early in the nineties, even before Edward VII had con- 
tracted his apprehension of Germany and while Nietzsche 
lay hidden in the decent obscurity of the German language 
unknown and unmentioned in England — halcyon fabular 
period ! — I was couching the lance of levity at this inspired 
misleader of modern thought, and throwing off irreverent 
impressions of the Kaiser who had come in a cocked hat 
to Venice to visit Umberto I— even at that delirious mo- 
ment of music and pageantry I see that I wondered how 
long the Italian Alliance would last — and had inconsider- 
ately moored his great white yacht, the Hohenzollern, 
exactly opposite my window. 

"This young man," I wrote, 1 "from all I have observed 
since he became my neighbor, lives a highly colored dramatic 
existence, in which there are sixty minutes to every hour, and 
sixty seconds to every minute, the sort of life that should have 
pleased Walter Pater. He must be a disciple of Nietzsche, a 
lover of the strong and splendid, this German gentleman who 
is just off to Vienna to prance at the head of fifteen hundred 
horsemen. While he lived opposite me it was all excursions 
and alarums. As a neighbor an Emperor is distinctly noisy." 

I proceed to point out — while admitting his exceptional 
virtues for a King — the danger which a monarch, with such a 
nursery passion for playing at soldiers, was to a semi- 
constitutional country like Germany, "a country over- 
civilized in thought and under-civilized in action," and a 
propos of Nietzsche's teaching I wrote: 

1 See my book, Without Prejudice (originally published in the Pall Mall 
Magazine). 



WITH AN APOLOGIA FOR NOT BEING PRO-GERMAN 9 

"Human nature is like Venice or Holland — a province slowly 
wrested from the sea, and secured by dams or dykes. Woe to 
him who makes a breach in the sea-walls!" 

For here is the true War for the World — this perpetual 
struggle of land and sea, this tenacious beating of the waves 
of barbarism against the dykes of civilization, to regain the 
ground won from the waste of waters; this tireless labor 
of the forces of Good to conserve their gains and reclaim 
marshes yet undrained. 

VII 

It is not only the Dutch who have 

"With mad labor fished the land to shore." 

Marvell's lines apply to many another territory netted 
from the ocean. 

"How did they rivet with gigantic piles, 
Thorough the centre their new-catched miles, 
And to the stake a struggling country bound 
Where barking waves still beat the forced ground." 

Those who are familiar with our oozy Eastern coast are 
aware how much soil there is which is halfway or at every 
other stage between land and water. We have for example 
saltings which may be grazed over at certain times but not, 
say, during the high spring tides, or which, reclaimed by a 
sea-wall, rise to the status of marshes; we have sands now 
impassable, now high and dry; we have pasture-land which 
gradually improves into arable land, and responds regularly 
to the plough. What is "fleet " or creek at noon is causeway 
at sunset, and where the cowman strode at sunrise, eels 
may gambol at twilight. The battle between sea and land, 
with man as ally or negligent neutral, goes on pauselessly 



IO SOME PROGNOSTICATIONS AND A PREFACE 

all along the line, with here a retreat and there an advance, 
and with on the whole a measurable shrinkage of land or a 
definite repulse of sea. 

This is precisely the battle of Ormuzd and Ahriman in 
the spiritual war-zone. But, carried on obscurely and con- 
tinuously at points innumerable in periods of superficial 
peace, it is not often that it ranges itself so visibly and pic- 
turesquely as in the rival battalions of Great Britain and 
Germany, nor that a war for the world between two Great 
Powers coincides so closely with the elemental clash of Good 
and Evil. Were the contest limited to those Powers, with 
no complications of Allies, black, white or yellow, and could 
we be sure that the victory of England would mean the 
defeat of Germany and not its spiritual domination, then, 
despite England's iniquities and shortcomings in other di- 
rections, we might almost say that the coincidence is ab- 
solute. For what is Prussian Militarism but a re-swamping 
of the territory dyked and cultivated by the painful labor 
of generations? 

VIII 

Unfortunately the effort to "fight the Germans like the 
Germans" only begets more Germanism. I am reminded 
of the police official who tried to arrest some Dukhobors for 
going about stark naked. In the heat of the chase — for 
they fled before him — he threw off his coat, and then his 
waistcoat, and then his trousers, and by the time he had 
come up with them, you could not tell him from Adam or a 
Dukhobor. Even so the method of military resistance to 
militarism, which is like the defensive opening of the sluices 
in the Low Countries, merely co-operates with the oncoming 
ocean in ruining the territory defended. A deluge — Waters- 
nood, as they say in Holland, — is now upon us, racing and 
foaming towards our islet of civilization from every quarter 



WITH AN APOLOGIA FOR NOT BEING PRO-GERMAN II 

of the compass. Let me give one little example — the book, 
The Way of the Red Cross, with a touching Preface by 
Queen Alexandra though as marvellous a record of human 
kindness as the Times' Fund is of journalistic achievement, 
yet blurs over the fact that the Red Cross is not a mere 
medical branch of the British Army — if it were, the War 
Office should pay for it — nor even a voluntary addition to 
the British Army, but a Christ-like body working "above 
the battle," and bound to devote equal care to the wounded 
enemy. It is only as it were through a slip of the pen that 
we learn from one passage of this book that there are 
German wounded under the care of our Red Cross corps. 
It seems to be feared that subscriptions would fall off, if 
Britons remembered too clearly that this work of mercy was 
international work. Here then is a distinct loss of spiritual 
territory once reclaimed from barbarism — the sea is back 
again amid the ruins of our groins and embankments. Mr. 
Bertrand Russell even asserts: — 

"On the Western front, at least, both sides have long ceased 
to take prisoners, except in large batches. I have heard an 
innocent-faced young Scotsman boasting to a fellow-soldier, 
amid roars of laughter, that he had bayonetted a disarmed 
German who knelt before him imploring mercy." 

What the Germans on their side have done we know from 
Lord Bryce's Report. But if there is any truth in the Ap- 
peal of the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society, 
our officials during a riot in Ceylon have behaved like the 
Germans in Belgium, if happily only on a small scale. As 
for their doings in Ireland — ! 

IX 

The Dutch — when a flood is impending — appoint in all 
threatened areas a local dijk graaf or Dyke-Reeve with 



12 SOME PROGNOSTICATIONS AND A PREFACE 

full military rights over the polder-land, to take whatever 
measures are necessary for its salvation. Where are our 
Dyke-Reeves before the Watersnood now fast reducing 
Europe to a spiritual swamp? They are not to be found 
in the Cabinets, for the statesman — Lord Haldane has told 
us frankly, though I cannot find it in Hegel — must follow, 
not lead, public opinion. The politician and the public 
can in fact only advance, like two drunken men, by leaning 
on each other. Nor does the Press — that reflex of the ad- 
vertiser and the reader — afford an escape from this vicious 
circle. The Stage is even more swiftly at the mercy of the 
mob, drawing still more costly breath. The Church — 
well, after all, vox populi vox dei — is a theological propo- 
sition. 

There indeed remain a few personalities — in the Lords, 
the Commons, the Press, even the Church, that have not 
bowed the knee to Baal. But even journalists who do not 
pander to the public and its idols have been so disequili- 
brated by the war that I have, on entering Fleet Street by 
what remains of Temple Bar, sometimes looked up expect- 
ing to see the inscription: "Abandon sense all ye who enter 
here; " followed perhaps by "For three years or the dura- 
tion of the war." 

In this general neglect of the dykes at a time when the 
danger from their neglect is at a maximum, I am impelled 
to present myself at the post of national duty as a dyke- 
custodian, a trustee of civilization — self-appointed. 

X 

But even a self-appointed functionary may tender his 
credentials and I respectfully beg to offer, in proof of my 
qualifications for the place, a record of many years of vigi- 
lance as a coastguard on the shore of the German Ocean. 



WITH AN APOLOGIA FOR NOT BEING PRO-GERMAN 13 

It is this record indeed which makes it so difficult for me 
to pose suddenly as a pro-German. My parlor-maid said 
to her mistress the day Armageddon broke out: "The 
Germans are on our side, aren't they, mum?" On being 
corrected, she duly proceeded to hate them. But I un- 
fortunately have a miso-Gothic past. That would not 
matter if I were a politician, for a politician has only a 
future. But liter a scripta manet — if only in the British 
Museum — and my uncomfortable prevision of the menace 
to modern civilization implicit in a race of Huns, not com- 
ing from without like the shatterers of the Roman Empire, 
but begotten at the very centre of that civilization, com- 
mitted me a la Cassandra to a series of fulminations and 
predictions that cannot well be explained away. 

XI 

At the end of 1907 for example, when the waves of 
Gothic barbarism threatened to submerge Prussian Poland, 
whose four million Poles the Reichstag — at the instigation 
of the "Hakatists" with their policy of Ausrotten — pro- 
posed to expropriate and replace by Prussians proper, the 
illustrious Polish novelist, Sinkiewicz, made an appeal to 
"the conscience of the world." 

In the polyglot volume he published at Paris, entitled 
Prusse et Pologne, I find myself protesting as follows, 
under date January the first, 1 1908: 

1 It is odd that Sinkiewicz, though he appealed to 250 persons throughout 
the world, did not apparently regard any ecclesiastic as incarnating its con- 
science. But then I remember at the beginning of the Twentieth Century 
diagnosing the dangers that threatened it, side by side with the then Arch- 
bishop of Canterbury, who replied like the Mad Hatter that he "had no 
idea." Mr. Wells, it is interesting to find, replied with similar^ modesty to 
Sinkiewicz, disclaiming knowledge of Polish politics. He had not then spent 
his famous fortnight in Russia. 



14 SOME PROGNOSTICATIONS AND A PREFACE 

"I feel honored that my opinion should be sought by so 
illustrious a writer as yourself, but I fear it will give you scanty 
comfort. As a Jew, I cannot agree with you that the proposed 
outrage upon German Poles is ' the greatest iniquity and infamy 
in the history of the Twentieth Century;' that abominable title 
has already been earned by the massacres of the Jews in Russia, 
carried out with official connivance and under circumstances 
of atrocity which have no parallel even in mediaeval times. I 
cannot believe that the twentieth century reserves for us a 
deeper horror. But this is almost the only hope I can permit 
myself of a century that has seen this occur with no effective 
protest. Might is recognized as the rule of life, Christianity 
has been deposed even from the lips of Governments. It rarely 
was anywhere else; but our century has grown too self-conscious 
to be able to leave it even this last resting-place. 

"In this degeneration of the human conscience Germany 
has played perhaps the leading role. After the brutal Germani- 
fication of the French provinces, I cannot see why you should 
be so astonished at the same treatment being extended to the 
Polish districts. Europe offered no protest against the iron 
hand re-moulding Alsace and Lorraine as a sculptor remodels 
his wax faces, why should you expect Europe to interfere on 
behalf of the Poles? Whence, cher maitre, come your optimism, 
your generous belief in the power of 'the pillars of civilization 
and intellectual culture!' You and I should know that a people 
that has lost its power of military resistance is the doomed prey 
of the nations with teeth and claws; though by another law of 
nature teeth and claws never suffice to destroy it utterly. It 
develops cunning to match the claws, and finds ways of lying 
low. The only force that can utterly dissolve a people is love. 
The wax face which, however moulded, will retain some trace 
of its original lineaments, can be entirely melted by the heat of 
love — by liberty, equality and fraternity. 1 But this recipe 
for assimilating races is rarely tried, and even when it is begun, 
mankind is rarely patient enough to carry it through. This 

1 A captain in the Austrian Polish Legion said he was fighting for the 
Austrians because of Austria's good treatment of the Poles. 



WITH AN APOLOGIA FOR NOT BEING PRO-GERMAN 1 5 

new persecution of the Poles will therefore only serve to accen- 
tuate the Polish nationality. 

"Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, under 
the inspiration of the generous policy of the Sigismunds, Poland 
was the chief land of refuge for the Jews, and it is a thousand 
pities that hosts and guests should now alike be swamped by 
the forces of barbarism. The Germany of Goethe and Schiller, 
of Kant and Beethoven, to which humanity turned in reverence, 
has been replaced by a Germany of blood and iron, a Germany, 
which as the Hague Conference proved, burdens all Europe with 
an ever increasing tax for armaments and is ready to sow the 
waters of the world with submarine mines: a Germany from 
which we turn shuddering. It only needs the dispossession of 
the Poles for Germany to lose her last lingering hold upon those 
whose respect is not for might but for civilization. Let her 
true patriots look to it, let them learn from the case of Hungary 
that even from a material point of view it does not pay to defy 
humanity's slowly evolved ideals of right and justice. Each 
of us can see the mote in his brother's eye and justice has thus 
still a certain almost universal support among those uncon- 
cerned in the particular issue — naturally always the majority 
of mankind. 

"Writing on the first of the year, I can but wish for you and 
your brother Poles, that the new year will witness the collapse 
of this lamentable and impolitic policy." 

XII 

At the May Meeting of a Peace Society, some six months 
before Sinkiewicz issued his appeal I find myself rebuking 
the shallow optimism of the late Mr. Stead, with whom I 
had already crossed olive-branches at a prior Peace Meet- 
ing, when after a tour of all the crowned heads of Europe 
he reported enthusiastically that the Millennium was al- 
most upon us: 

"I take the opportunity," I wrote, "of reminding Mr. Stead 



1 6 SOME PROGNOSTICATIONS AND A PREFACE 

that more good will be done by facing the brutal facts of life 
and the European situation than by allowing the wish that 
war shall cease to be father to the thought that it is ceasing. 
When Mr. Stead and I were last together on a peace platform, 
he maintained that I was unduly pessimistic in the face of a 
most glorious prospect of universal peace and disarmament. 
I said it was very doubtful if disarmament would be brought 
at all nearer by this conference, and that Germany was the 
enemy. Mr. Stead insisted that the Kaiser was the greatest 
peace lover in Europe, and apparently only wore so many 
uniforms for amusement. I venture to repeat that those who 
preach against war must never under-rate its glamour, and par- 
ticularly the great vested interests which depend upon its con- 
tinuance. It is only by education, by creating the glamour of 
peace, to offset the glamour of war, that any real amelioration 
can be effected. I need not say I am in the greatest sympathy 
with the objects of your meeting; but your peace crusade will 
need an enormously greater organization to make any dints 
upon the mailed battalions of war." 

To add to the difficulty of my turning pro- German now, 
I actually placed the responsibility for the coming war on 
Germany's shoulders years before she had written Austria's 
ultimatum to Serbia, and like Mrs. Partington trying to 
keep back the Atlantic with her broom, I tried to keep back 
the German Ocean with my pen. Through my blank- 
verse Tragedy, "The War God," produced at His Maj- 
esty's Theatre by Sir Herbert Tree in 191 1 (and written 
several years earlier) , humanity was invited to consider the 
rival issues raised for it by Bismarck and Tolstoy, the two 
giant protagonists of the century, the War for the World 
beside which the material struggle between Alba and 
Gotha for the mastery of the planet was a triviality. The 
mysterious assassination of this play in the heart of London 
in broad daylight may perhaps be counted, like the in- 
finitely more deplorable murder of Jaures, among the 



WITH AN APOLOGIA FOR NOT BEING PRO-GERMAN 1 7 

earliest casualties in the cosmic combat. It was followed — 
soon after the outburst of war — by the Foreign Office 
prohibition of my play " The Melting Pot " at the request 
of Russia. A third play of mine, " The New Religion," had 
already been prohibited by the Lord Chamberlain. But 
these evidences of England's growing passion for Prus- 
sianism were hardly calculated to increase my liking for it. 

XIII 

Not that censorship of the Stage is new — it was in fact 
the one piece of Prussianism left like a fly in amber in the 
British Constitution. An historian remarks that in Tudor 
days the dramatist was practically outside Magna Charta, 
"liable to instant imprisonment without bail, trial or ap- 
peal at the hands of the stage censor." It may even be 
admitted that the institution was primarily designed not 
to protect morals but politicians and princes, and that it 
was the politico-satirical plays of Fielding that called forth 
the more constitutional Licensing Act of 1737. A dram- 
atist might be well content to be quashed in company with 
the author of Rule, Britannia, whose historic tragedy 
" Edward and Eleonara " was prohibited, not to mention 
Shakespeare (a whole act of whose Richard III was cut 
out by the Master of the Revels), Middleton, Massinger, 
Beaumont and Fletcher, Steele, Dryden, Gay and the 
blameless Miss Mitford. What is new in the business, 
however, is the re-inforcement of the Lord Chamberlain 
by the Foreign Office; an innovation which seems to have 
begun when " The Mikado " was so ridiculously interdicted 
to please Japan, and another comic opera, " Morocco 
Bound " was modified to appease the susceptibilities of the 
Sultan of Turkey. 

That because Russia is in alliance with us, it is the duty 



1 8 SOME PROGNOSTICATIONS AND A PREFACE 

of the Foreign Office to keep her uncriticized may seem a 
plausible contention. But on examination it amounts 
not only to interference in the internal affairs of England 
and with our British notions of liberty — and that he can- 
not interfere in the internal affairs of Russia is Sir Edward 
Grey's pet shibboleth — but it also identifies the State with 
any and every theatre. Now there is no State Theatre — 
I wish there was, even at the risk of its having to represent 
the views of the Foreign Office. But to suffer from the 
drawbacks of a State Theatre, and enjoy none of the ad- 
vantages of its existence, is an intolerable situation for the 
dramatist. It would be so simple for the Foreign Office 
to say to the Russian Ambassador: "England, you may 
not have noticed, is a land of liberty and the theatres are 
private enterprises, for which the State has no responsi- 
bility." An astute Foreign Office would even see the ad- 
vantage of a medium for conveying hints or suggestions to 
foreign countries through non-committal channels. So 
far, however, from recognizing and exploiting this demo- 
cratic instrument, the Government has even extended the 
censorship to newspapers, thus staking England's entire 
fortunes on the wisdom of the official view. 

Newspapers, like theatres, have a certain public charac- 
ter, but when, as I understand from high quarters, the De- 
fence of the Realm Act carries over even into the purely 
individual realm of books, our liberties are indeed in a 
parlous condition, and the pages I have been compelled 
to suppress in this very book are an ominous reminder of 
the distance we have travelled from the doctrine of Milton's 
Areopagiticus. 1 They are moreover an interesting illustra- 

1 The censorship of the press is one of the worst losses of the war. The 
notion that the German Staff would spend its days and nights in piecing 
together d la Sherlock Holmes stray items in odd newspapers, is childish: 
not to mention the possibility that would then arise of fooling it fatally. 
The editorial censorship, whether commercial or conscientious, is surely bad 



WITH AN APOLOGIA FOR NOT BEING PRO-GERMAN 1 9 

tion of the central thesis of this book that there is neither 
truce nor standstill in the war for the world, that no liberty 
is so old-established as to be safe, and that what our an- 
cestors won for us we shall not necessarily bequeath to our 
children. 

"Now we can only wait for the day, wait and apportion our shame, 

These are the dykes our fathers left, but we would not look to the 
same. 

Time and again were we warned of the dykes, time and again we 
delayed; 

Now, it may fall, we have slain our sons as our fathers we have be- 
trayed." 

XIV 

Inter arma silent leges. Rome in war-time surrendered 
herself to a dictator. It is disconcerting — but it may be 
a grim necessity — that our war for the freedom of the world 
shall mean — if only pro tern — the enslavement of England, 
the sweeping away by the old waste of waters of all her 
secular landmarks. Burke thought that the politician was 
a wary beast, and that knowing that most people see — and 
see only — what happened before they were born, he would 
not — when attempting a new arbitrary imposition — stamp 
upon its forehead such a name as Ship-Money. But ship- 
money could be imposed to-day — nay, is imposed — as easily 
as anything else. "The Defence of the Realm Act, which 
ran through a Radical House of Commons in a few hours," 
says the Westminster Gazette, "made an end of Magna 
Charta, and scrapped whole centuries of our history. We 
have neither liberty of the person, nor liberty of the Press, 1 

enough without the Governmental gag. Even our ministers are astonished 
when told things known for months to everybody outside the ambit of our 
Press Bureau, a state of things that might produce fatal surprises. 

1 The fining of the Bystander £200 for a comic cartoon will be an historical 
index of war-mentality. 



20 SOME PROGNOSTICATIONS AND A PREFACE 

nor liberty of trade." A coil of passports, regulations, 
ordinances and measures impedes life and ties labor. Our 
privacy is slit open by the postal censor. 

Under the plea Salus reipublicce suprema lex, even Habeas 
Corpus is gone — for a British-born subject may be im- 
prisoned without reason given or without trial. We have 
lived to see military and industrial conscription, accom- 
panied by a "petty Prussianism" which has disgusted even 
conscriptionist organs, secret trials before illegally minded 
officials, executions of unnamed persons for unknown of- 
fences, some of them soldier lads under twenty, intern- 
ment of thousands of able-bodied aliens (some of them even 
seized with a high hand upon the high seas when they were 
deserting their fatherlands) , winding up of enemy companies, 
and ruthless sentences for purely technical offences pro- 
nounced by panic-stricken magistrates, whose obiter dicta 
occasionally reveal a childishness beyond words. 

Thus a commercial traveller, a British subject, was not 
allowed to return to his American home on the ground that 
the goods he represented ought to have been made in Eng- 
land. A German-speaking witness was told to learn a 
language worth speaking. 

This Prussianism pro tern has only been made possible by 
the device of a Coalition Government, for this is not, as it 
pretends, a union of all the talents — that, as Herbert 
Spencer pointed out half a century ago, could be better 
secured by utilizing the best business men — but a shield 
against criticism and a cover for blunders. As Lord Lore- 
burn said so excellently in the House of Lords, a parlia- 
mentary danger relieved, is not a national danger relieved. 
The Defence of the Realm Act is in fact a Defence of the 
Cabinet Act. The rapidity with which war reverses gener- 
ations of history is only another proof of its degenerative 
character — war is perhaps really the test of a people, not 



WITH AN APOLOGIA FOR NOT BEING PRO-GERMAN 21 

of their brute strength but of whether their constitution is 
a reality alive in their spirit or a mere dead heritage. Of 
course all the other belligerents have slid back as swiftly 
as Britain, but corruptio optimi pessima. It does not 
seem to occur to anybody that a great nation must take a 
little risk for a great principle. 

XV 

Nor can the Government be accused of not representing 
the people, for the mob has bettered the Government 
oblawas (or alien drives) by pogroms (attacks on property 
though happily free from murder) and it clamors for still 
more internments (regardless of the expense, and of the 
waste of labor-force), still more high-handed hampering 
of neutrals, and for non-recognition of naturalization 
scraps of paper. Lloyds and the Baltic Exchange suspend 
members, Shipping Companies refuse to embark emigrants. 
Town-Councillors remove the name of the German maker 
from the dial of the parish clock and — with a still more 
comical desire to put back the clock of civilization — a 
Mr. Herbert Stephen writes to the Times that it would be 
" exceedingly disagreeable to have the same time here as in 
Germany!" How truly observes Romain Rolland, " Un 
grand peuple assailli par la guerre n'a pas seulement ses 
frontieres a defendre il a aussi sa raison." Even scholars 
rush to run down the German Science they have always 
profited by, and learned bodies hasten to remove their 
German members. Anti-German Leagues break up Quaker 
meetings, disturbing the immemorial Elian quiet. Even in 
Parliament a military member back from the trenches was 
allowed to declare without rebuke from the Speaker that if 
he had had another honorable member in his battalion at 
the front, that gentleman would have been strung up by the 



22 SOME PROGNOSTICATIONS AND A PREFACE 

thumbs before he had been there half an hour! There 
could not be a more salutary illustration of Burke's axiom 
that "the civil power, like every other that calls in the 
aid of an ally stronger than itelf, perishes by the assistance 
it receives." 

Such things at home do not tend to put an allegation 
like the Baralong episode at sea beyond the need of formal 
disproof by the Admiralty. Undoubtedly the pitilessness 
of Prussianism is responsible for much of this debacle of 
Britishism, — that is how evil engenders evil. But unless 
these phenomena prove — as we must hope they will prove — 
the mere mania of war-fever, to be dispelled by the first 
cool touch of Peace, Germany — even if we pulverize her — 
will have destroyed the Britain we knew 

"A land of settled Government, 
A land of old and just renown 
Where Freedom broadens slowly down 
From precedent to precedent." 

One wonders indeed whether Tennyson would have carried 
out his threat to leave such an England 

"Should banded unions persecute 
Opinion, and induce a time 
When single thought is civil crime 
And individual freedom mute." 

How odd that it is from a member of Mr. Asquith's con- 
stricted House of Lords that comes the stately reminder 
of Britain's real greatness as the pioneer of freedom. 1 And 
how pathetically reads the letter 2 of the veteran Liberal, 
Sir Edward Fry, on the murder of Magna Charta! "The 
shock that I have received from the judgment of Sir Ed- 

1 Lord Parmoor's Letter to the Times, March i, 1916. 

2 The Times, February 25, 1916. 



WITH AN APOLOGIA FOR NOT BEING PRO-GERMAN 23 

ward Halliday has made some words of the ancient docu- 
ment resound continually in my ears." 

The late Emil Reich, whose clairvoyance of the coming 
war was so marvellous, seems yet to have been mistaken in 
thinking that in the hour of crisis, free England would re- 
veal great personalities as opposed to the mechanical medi- 
ocrities of "the model monster." We have had as yet 
only the mediocrities without even the mechanical perfec- 
tion. The cry "Nothing matters, unless we win the war" 
reveals rather the temper of a lady throwing her bonnet 
over the mills than of a great historic nation with its thou- 
sand years of heroic vicissitude. 

The pity is all the more because of the greatness Britain 
at war has shown in so many directions — in the boundless- 
ness of her effort and her sacrifice, the nobility of her young 
men, her generosity towards Belgium, and the spiritual 
gravitation she has exercised upon her remotest Colonies 
and Dependencies. Mr. G. K. Chesterton has written a 
characteristic book, called more suo The Crimes of Eng- 
land, the point of which is, I gather, that this is the first 
war in which England has been in the right. That is further 
than even Coleridge (who once cursed his country) or 
Cowper (who bade her cease to " grind India ") or Words- 
worth (on whom the freight of her offences lay heavy) 
has ever gone. But if Mr. Chesterton is correct — and the 
crimes of Chesterton are many — it is certainly odd that the 
first war in which England has been in the right should 
be the one war in which she has temporarily ceased to 
exist. 

"Who lives if England dies?" asked Kipling finely. But 
England does not live if her mere geographical semblance 
survives. One is reminded of the words Tacitus put into 
the mouth of Otho. "Quid? 1 vos pulcherrimam hanc ur- 

1 Historic, Book I, Cap. 84. 



24 SOME PROGNOSTICATIONS AND A PREFACE 

bem domibus et tectis et congestu lapidum stare creditis? 
Muta ista et inanima intercidere ac reparari promiscua 
sunt: aeternitas rerum et pax gentium et mea cum vestra 
salus incolumitate senatus firmatur. Hunc auspicato a 
parente et conditore urbis nostras institutum, et a regibus 
usque ad principes continuum et immortalem, sicut a ma- 
joribus accepimus, sic posteris tradamus. Nam ut vobis 
senatores, ita ex senatoribus principes nascuntur." 

"No more speeches!" cried Lord Glenconner, and spoke 
England's mood of the moment. That the first duty of 
Parliament is to parler, and not to fight in the trenches, 
that action cannot supersede counsel, and that a brusque 
soldierly "let us get on with the war" does not help us to 
win it, and that the dignity of a great nation requires it to 
go its way with imperturbable majesty, was an opinion I was 
at first alone in expressing. My speech "Wake up, Parlia- 
ment," republished in this volume, was regarded by some 
as scandalous, if not indeed treasonable. But I soon lived 
to see its point of view adopted by the Times, which had 
welcomed the dumbness of Westminster as a symptom of 
national unity, but which speedily perceived that Parlia- 
ment is never more necessary than in a great war whose 
duration is uncertain, nay, which found itself compelled to 
be the missing voice of the nation — a service I recognize 
as beyond price, much as I may disagree with particular 
things said by the voice. Parliament itself has never re- 
covered its potency. Paralyzed by the device of a non- 
party Ministry, devoid constitutionally of the power over 
foreign affairs possessed by many other Parliaments, which 
form Committees entitled to call for papers and cross- 
examine Ministers, hectored over by the Zabernian rhet- 
oric of M. P.'s from the front, menaced by the hysteria 
of the constituencies as well as hypnotized by its own, 
flinging away money by the thousand millions without 



WITH AN APOLOGIA FOR NOT BEING PRO-GERMAN 25 

question or criticism, 1 abandoning the control of the purse 
for which it was recently waging war with the House of 
Lords, the House of Commons has presented a pitiable 
spectacle, ironically enhanced by the armlets sported by 
some of the members. The degradation reached its climax 
in the conscription comedy, preluded by the farcical fraud 
of the National Register. 

A hireling army is no ideal of mine. "Despicable" I 
wrote years ago "is the nation which sends mercenaries 
to do its fighting." 2 A citizen army is the only militarism 
the future can tolerate, and the rough-and-ready methods 
of voluntary enlistment, in a nation without the tradition 
of national service, indubitably worked injustice, as by the 
patriotic rush of "only sons" whom conscription would 
have passed by. 

But for a great nation to swop its national system in the 
middle of a war, to introduce conscription on the basis of a 
wager whether a certain number of single men would vol- 
unteer or not — and then not even to take the number of 
the single men as they enlisted, but to proceed entirely upon 
guesswork, — an ethic that would have scandalized Crock- 
ford's gaming club — and subsequently to try to justify the 
guess by hustling into the army "everything on two legs" 
(even on cork legs) and "unstarring" the "starred" young 
men already supposed to be allowed for in the "statistics" — 
all this is more like Mexico or a lunatic ward than Tenny- 
son's stately old island. The notion that it is quantity, 
quantity, quantity that matters has long amazed all of us 
who play chess and are accustomed to see Kings beaten in 
the very thick of their men. No wonder the Southwark 

1 In the debate on Mr. McKenna's last Budget, the greatest in our history, 
one speaker "complained there had hardly been a quorum present through- 
out." (Times, April 6, 1916.) 

2 Kalian Fantasies. Risorgimento. 



26 SOME PROGNOSTICATIONS AND A PREFACE 

Tribunal exempted pro km the one man in all England 
able to nt padded rooms in asylums. 

My sympathy with Sir John Simon is. however, dimin- 
ished by the fact that he let pass without a word — such is 
the slackness of even the best of Parliamentarians now- 
adays — the real introduction of conscription. That oc- 
curred when the time-expired soldiers and marines had their 
term of service compulsorily extended. But that the 
London Clubs should have considered Sir John Simon's 
noble sacrifice of his political position a symptom of dubi- 
ous sanity- throws a significant light upon the spirit of our 
fight for Liberty. 

Beholding thus how 

"• Freedom namms swiftly 1 down 
From precedent to precedent." 

I ask myself whether the vaunted resolution of Britons 
never to be slaves is only an old song. If so over the British 
Empire may be written Ichubod. For its greatness is in- 
separably bound up with its freedom. The attempt to run 
the British Empire without Britishism is suicidal. 

An Australian M. F. W. Eggleston of Melbourne) put 
the truth strongly in a recent number of the Xatioti when 
he wrote: 

"But above all material ties, above all ties based upon com- 
mon danger or co mm on interest, the factor which plays the 
greatest part in holding the Empire together is the spiritual 
leadership of the world by Great Britain. It is Britain — the 
cradle of freedom and modern democracy, the mother of Parlia- 
ments, the most successful exponent of the principles of re- 

— litly not slowly. Facilis descensus. As Rornain Rolland says: "Dans 
la lutte eternelle entre le mal et le bien. la partie if est pas egale: il tant un 
siecle pour constnrire, cequ'un jour sufat a detruire."' 



WITH AX APOLOGIA FOR NOT BEING PRO-GERMAX 2J 

sponsible representative Government — who attracts the imagi- 
nation and secures the passionate devotion of a young democracy 
like Australia. If weak and trembling hands let fall this sceptre, 
then the days of the Empire as a powerful, united, positive 
force in the world are numbered." 

Sharing his advantage of seeing the Empire at a non- 
parochial angle, I have often striven to bring home the same 
truth to my fellow-citizens. Speaking when Edward VII. 
succeeded to it — exactlv a thousand years after Edward I. — 
I said: 1 

"H you were as much in contact with foreign opinion as I 
am, if you knew how the thought of England lives and glows 
in the hearts of the oppressed — as the sun of liberty, the ark of 
refuge — then you would be more careful than you are to keep 
this great vision, this splendid ideal, untarnished, even by for- 
eign misconceptions and alien misunderstandings. Caesar's 
Empire — as well as Caesar's wife — must be above suspicion." 

But why cite Mr. Eggleston and myself, when there is 
Plato? 

"Now there is a voice from each form of polity, as it were 
from certain animals: one from a democracy, another from an 
oligarchy, and another from a monarchy. . . . Whichever 
then of these polities speaks with its own voice, both to gods 
and men, and produces actions, correspondent to its voice, it 
nourishes ever, and is preserved; but when it imitates another 
voice, it is destroyed." 

For which reason, if for no other. I trust that after the 
war. despite our pro-German press, the British Constitu- 
tion will be thoroughly repaired and re-painted. 

1 The occasion was a dinner to Mr. Linley Simbourne of Punch over which 
I was presiding. 



28 SOME PROGNOSTICATIONS AND A PREFACE 

XVI 

Much of this obscurantist activity on the part of our 
Press Bureau and our Press has been devoted to maintaining 
the mirage of "Rosy Russia," and our men of letters with 
whom I had co-operated in signing a manifesto against 
Germany declaring that we in Great Britain were "conscious 
of a destiny and a duty ... to maintain the free and law- 
abiding ideals of Western Europe" signed behind my back 
another manifesto — to Russia — calculated to give fresh 
rosiness to the myth. I was glad to note that the author 
of The Truce of the Bear was not among the signatories. 

Russia, across whose vast steppes the war for the world 
now rages both spiritually and physically, and which is 
fighting with equal heroism and nobility in both zones, is 
unquestionably a splendid potentiality in which lie latent 
one of the great countries and peoples of the future, des- 
tined to enrich humanity in every department. But at 
present it is only a giant embryo, whose very calendar lags 
symbolically behind. According to its best friends it is 
at present a Continent of an alphabetic 1 if lovable moujiks — 
140 to 150 million spread over three Europes — who al- 
though piously Christian are practically pagan in their 
superstitions and primeval earth-rites. 2 They are environed 
by a torpid and degraded Church 3 which has not yet 
reached the stage of relating religion to life but is a Church 
of Prayer and Praise. So ignorant are the remoter members 
of this vast peasantry that according to an Englishwoman 
well acquainted with Russia 4 some of our allies in the pres- 

1 Seventy-five per cent cannot read or write, according to a letter in the 
Times (January 3, 19 16). 

2 See Times' Russian Supplement (February 24, 1916). 

3 See Dr. Sarolea, also a Russian Countess in the Daily Chronicle, inter- 
viewed by Harold Begbie. 

4 Mrs. Rosa Newmarch in the Times, January 4, 1916. 



WITH AN APOLOGIA FOR NOT BEING PRO-GERMAN 20. 

ent war had never heard of the English at all, or at best con- 
fused them with the French. Nay, they did not even know 
all their own forty-eight races, for another recent writer on 
Russia tells us that a group from far Siberia arriving at 
Warsaw, after days in the train, and seeing people of other 
traits and vestures, asked of their officers, "can we begin 
killing now?" x 

This backbone of Russia is supplemented (according to 
these same friendly authorities) by a miseducated, loose- 
living and misleading minority of doctrinaire revolution- 
aries out of touch with the real Russian people, which its 
shallowness wishes to endow with Western representative 
institutions, and by a growing industrial element which, 
to believe Stephen Graham, is the worst type of humanity 
that has ever afflicted the planet, "crass, heavy, ugly, un- 
faithful, unclean, impure," 2 and which is the only element 
in which political unrest really exists. 

There is also in the Baltic provinces a considerable Ger- 
man-speaking population that combines with the bureau- 
cratic ruling elements, which are in sympathy with Prussian 
rigidity, to constitute a large pro-German factor. Nor are 
Germans the only exotic stock. Of the forty-eight races in 
Russia only two-thirds, roughly speaking, are Russians 
proper, or Orthodox Christians. No less than thirty per 
cent, including nearly twenty million Mohammedans, are 
of other sects or faiths. England, faced in India, with a 
similar problem, has boldly solved it by a policy of equal 
justice for all faiths and races, and the loyalty of the Indian 
troops is her reward. Russia — and the ideal of Pobiedon- 
ostseff is applauded by Mr. Stephen Graham — seeks rather 
the unity of the strait waistcoat and the Procrustean bed. 
These motley races and creeds are to be adjusted to a Slavo- 

1 Russia, Die Balkans, and the Dardanelles. (Granville Fortescue.) 

2 Changing Russia, by Stephen Graham. 



30 SOME PROGNOSTICATIONS AND A PREFACE 

phil system of which the three principles are : Samoderjavie 
(Autocracy), Pravoslavie (Orthodoxy), Narodnost (nation- 
ality). 1 And the reactionary organs inspired by the Ste- 
phen Graham propaganda tell us that for the Russian 
Jews to demand rights from "a system created by a Chris- 
tian State for its own protection" 2 is "to treat with con- 
tempt the realities of an Empire whose political institu- 
tions and intelligence are still in embryo." 3 To which 
I can imagine the shade of a Russian Jew replying: 

" Perhaps it was right to make life such a hell, 
But why did you murder me too? " 

XVII 

An alliance with an Empire of such rudimentary "in- 
stitutions and intelligence" — in which France had the dis- 
honor of leading the way — could not fail — however neces- 
sary to safety — to radiate maleficent influences even when 
it was an entente. M. Kulmazin, President of the Council 
of the Empire, calls it "a humanitarian alliance," a de- 
scription on which more than one page of this book is a 
sufficient commentary, not to mention the many docu- 
ments in my possession which must remain unpub- 
lished till the censorship is relaxed. It is only fair to say, 
however, that some of these documents themselves dem- 
onstrate how powerless is even the civil bureaucracy be- 
fore the military, so that, by analogy and comparatively, 
Russia may not be so much more under the mailed fist 
than ourselves. Indeed, I have arrived at a most com- 
fortable conclusion. In the first place now that we are on a 
level with Russia, knowing exactly what it means not to 

1 See that often excellent book, Europe's Debt to Russia, by Dr. Sarolea, a 
writer, however, who does not halt between two opinions but expresses both 
on different pages; doubtless through the necessity of living up to his title. 

2 Morning Post. 

3 Pall Mall Gazette, February 27, 1915. 



WITH AN APOLOGIA FOR NOT BEING PRO-GERMAN 3 1 

enter or leave our own country without a coil of passports 
and delays, and police inquisitions, 1 and to be hampered 
day and night by military regulations — for of course our 
war regime is Russia's peace regime— the union seems much 
less unnatural. And in the second place my former fear 
that like a matrimonial misalliance it would drag us down, 
that the British bureaucratic tiger having tasted blood 
would have no relish to return to his pre-war menu, has been 
dispelled. For if we are old and tired, disappointed of 
democracy and blase in freedom, Russia comes to the eternal 
quest of liberty with a young hope, an unjaded enthusiasm, 
a burning thirst and an idyllic inexperience. Thus it is Russia 

1 A Russian friend domiciled in England tells me, however, that our police 
are too gentlemanly to be efficient. Certainly the notorious Fatherland of 
New York, hurled at me every week from New York in an envelope, is almost 
the only American letter to me that is never censored. In the Dallas scandal 
at the Home Office we had, however, a foretaste of what happens in a bu- 
reaucratic country, and if we really settle down to Russianism, no doubt a 
double language will be invented by journalists and the public generally to 
baffle the censorship. Thus a Russian lady wishing to make me acquainted 
with what was happening to the Jews of Russia behind the official veil wrote 
me a long allegorical letter about the misfortunes of my "poor relatives," 
while another informed me she was studying certain Bible texts on which she 
desired my views viz., Jer. XIV, 17, Gen. IV, 14, Jer. XIII, 19, 20, Isa. LII, 
3, Jer. XIII, 15-17, Esth. IV, 14, Lev. XLX, 17, Amos I, 9. I give here the 
first four put together as she designed. For confirmation see article herein on 
The Jewish Factor in the War. 

Jer. XIV, 17. — And thou shalt say this word unto them; let mine eyes run 
down with tears night and day, and let them not cease : for the virgin daugh- 
ter of my people is broken with a great breach, with a very grievous wound. 

Gen. IV, 14. — Behold, thou hast driven me out this day from the face of 
the earth, and from thy face shall I be hid; and I shall be a fugitive and a 
wanderer in the earth; and it shall come to pass, that every one that findeth 
me shall slay me. 

Jer. XIII, 19-20. — The cities of the south are shut up, and there is none 
to open them : Judah is carried away captive all of it, it is wholly carried away 
captive. Lift up your eyes and behold them that come from the north: 
where is the flock that was given thee, thy beautiful flock? 

Isa. LII, 3. — For thus saith the Lord: Ye were sold for nought; and not 
by money shall ye be redeemed. 



32 SOME PROGNOSTICATIONS AND A PREFACE 

that will drag us up and in the ardor of the ever-developing 
Duma our faded Parliament will renew its youth. 1 

XVIII 

In so far as it deals with Russia, "The Melting Pot" is 
on historic ground. The pogrom at Kishineff in 1904 has 
already a whole literature devoted to it, and the notion that 
foreign history can be hushed up in any particular country 
when the political conditions demand, opens up a geograph- 
ical conception of history which transcends even Pascal's 
famous " Verite au degd des Pyrenees, erreiir au deld." But 
the moral of the play is not anti-Russian at all as was ex- 
cellently pointed out by my brother novelist (and novelist 
brother), Mr. Louis Zangwill, in a letter to the Daily 
Chronicle, whose interviewer had misrepresented his views. 

"Although the dramatic action of the play was based on a 
Russian pogrom against the Jews, it yet raises the question: 
'Could Jew and Russian, though separated by the -widest gap 
conceivable, nevertheless come together spiritually through 
the healing power of a higher ideal of humanity?' And the 
play answers distinctly, emphatically, 'Yes!' 

"As I pointed out to your representative, the play is thus 
symbolic, and foreshadows the future rapprochement between 
the Russian and the Jewish peoples. The contrast between the 
narrow fanaticism of the bureaucratic old Russia and the 
idealistic aspirations of the new young Russia is clearly and 
sharply drawn, but it is obviously impossible to draw such a 
contrast without dwelling equally on the two factors to it, 
though one of these, never meant to be viewed alone, may have 
displeased the Foreign Office. It is therefore open to question 
whether the Foreign Office has really exercised a wise judgment 

1 1 had hardly written these words when I read of an interview with 
M. Rodzianko, the President of the Duma, in which he — a Conservative — is 
reported as saying: "After this war you could no more stop free speech than 
a dam could hold the winter floods when Spring comes. Yes, after this war 
it will be in Russia like the Spring." (Daily Chronicle, February 29, 19 16.) 



WITH AN APOLOGIA FOR NOT BEING PRO-GERMAN 3$ 

in the matter. Personally, if I may express an opinion of my 
own, I am certain that the whole Jewish people, especially in 
view of the Russian alliance with England, would gladly wipe 
the past out of their minds in the appreciation of the significance 
of a new, free, and regenerated Russia." 

Nor, though incidentally offensive to the "Black Hun- 
dreds" is the play concerned with Russia except as a place 
to escape from. Its theme is America, with its fusion of 
races under a new human ideal, an ideal whose illumination 
was never more necessary than at this Cimmerian moment, 
and this makes the subservience of the Foreign Office to 
the Russian Bureaucracy a double treason against human- 
ity. For what had prompted me to write the play was the 
consciousness that the War for the World had shifted to a 
new battle-zone, and that in America — to use the great 
words of Abraham Lincoln — "we shall nobly save or 
meanly lose the last great hope of earth." 

Mr. G. K. Chesterton, for whom "the last great hope of 
earth" lies in the rear, in criticising the "Melting Pot's" 
ideal of looking forward and of accentuating "The God of 
our Children" rather than "The God of our Fathers," 
remarked that this is "Nonsense, nonsense, nonsense" — 
an iteration that lacks only the damnable — because the 
past is unchangeably fixed and known, and the future un- 
known and unknowable. (I regret I cannot remember his 
exact words, always excepting his triple "nonsense.") 
But the past is not really known, 1 nor is the past unchange- 

1 As Faust puts it, 

" Mein Freund, die Zeiten der Vergangenheit 
Sind uns ein Buch mit sieben Siegeln 
Was ihr den geist der Zeiten heisst 
Das ist im grund der Herren eigner geist 
In dem die Zeiten sich bespiegeln." 

In the simpler language of Voltaire, ancient history is only " des fables 
convenues." See his tale "Jeannot et Colin." 



34 SOME PROGNOSTICATIONS AND A PREFACE 

able. This paradox I am sure will commend me to Mr. 
Chesterton's heart but it rests on the simple fact that you 
can alter your relation to the past and therefore alter the 
proportion the past bears in the totality of your history. 
For instance, 1914 will be either the blackest year in human 
history, or the beginning of a new and happier era, accord- 
ing to what we make of it. The past in fact remains as a 
series of half-dead seeds, any of which may be revived by a 
changed relation to it. Nor does the unknowability of the 
future — which is at worst merely partial — prevent our trying 
to mould it to an ideal pattern conceived in our conscious- 
ness. This is in fact what every reformer is doing all the 
time. 

XIX 

Lest the superior person, lifting an eye-brow at my ad- 
miration for America, dismiss me as a belated doctrinaire 
democrat, let me remark that I have always defined my- 
self as " a democrat with a profound mistrust of the people." 
The tyranny of majorities is worse than the majority of 
tyrannies. Democracy, like so many human arrangements, 
is simply the least bad of all the alternatives, and it con- 
tains within itself — as no other form of Government does — 
its own antidote. 1 Sully has observed — and Burke has 
endorsed the observation — that the people never rise 
from any instinct of rebellion but from mere impatience of 
its sufferings. And democracy, tempered by Tammany, 
is better than autocracy tempered by assassination. Even 
so great a thinker as Kant, groping for a Philosophy of 

1 An Italian book, by a Professor of Political Economy at Basle has been 
published pretending to expose democracy, on the ground the leaders always 
become autocrats and bureaucrats. But I have long ago said that it is 
"disguised aristocracy" — only it is an elected and removable chosen aristoc- 
racy — and this makes all the difference. 



WITH AN APOLOGIA FOR NOT BEING PRO-GERMAN 35 

History, looked upon the American Constitution as a for- 
ward step in human history, and John Bright said in one of 
his eloquent perorations: — 

"It may be a vision but I will cherish it. I see one vast con- 
federation stretching from the frozen North in unbroken line 
to the glowing South, and from the wild billows of the Atlantic 
Westward to the calmer waters of the Pacific main — and I 
see one people, and one language and one law, and one faith, 
and over all that wide continent, the home of freedom, 
and a refuge for the oppressed of every race and of every 
clime." 

The vision, like so many poetic visions, failed to take ac- 
count of all the facts — notably of the black problem that 
literally darkens the picture, and of the financial magnates 
living like mediaeval robber-barons, each in his turreted 
Trust. But even Bryce, the sober student of The Ameri- 
can Commonwealth writes of it in the closing chapter of 
his classical work as "the latest experiment which mankind 
have tried and the last which they can ever hope to try 
under equally favorable conditions." 

In fact the "War for the World" — that eternal duel of 
Ormuzd and Ahriman, of Good and Evil — stands in America 
at one of its most critical moments, since our planet was 
launched upon its mystic adventure. Here is the forefront 
of the battle, the first line of trenches, always in danger of 
being re- taken. 

XX 

Long before the "Melting Pot" tried to bring home to 
America by a vivid image of her manifest mission that she 
carried humanity and its fortunes, I had published in the 
closing days of the nineteenth century — at the invitation 



36 SOME PROGNOSTICATIONS AND A PREFACE 

of a great American organ — a forecast of the forces of 
reaction against which she would have to struggle in the 
new century. 

"The twentieth century," I wrote, "will be America's critical 
century. Will she develop on the clear lines laid down by her 
great founders, or will she survive, like most human institutions, 
as a caricature and contradiction of the ideals of her creators? 
Will she fall back into outworn feudalisms, accepting second- 
hand ideals from the Europe she has outgrown? Small as is 
the significance of aristocracy in the modern world of Europe, 
it is at least the petrifaction of what was once living and signif- 
icant. The original adoration of nobility was not snobbery but 
respect for real superiority. But the modern American love of 
a lord is the worship of a withered leaf. That all men are 
created free and equal is a nobler proposition, if "free" be in- 
terpreted as having a right to one's own body and soul, and 
"equal" as having a right to develop one's own body and soul 
to their highest. America became the exponent of these ideals; 
every other conception has been tried and found wanting. And 
for America to hash up again hereditary aristocracy and mili- 
tarism would be a ridiculous anti-climax. If America breaks 
away from her ideals, humanity's last chance will be gone — at 
least for the white races: for perhaps — who knows? — destiny 
would seek its next instrument among the despised colored 
races. O if America were less conscious of her own greatness, 
and more conscious of the greatness of her opportunity! 

"The Eighteenth Century saw the dawn of generous ideals 
of the Brotherhood of Man. What the Jewish prophets had 
dreamed twenty-five centuries before, became the dream of 
the noblest spirits of Europe. The Nineteenth Century, which, 
by its electric links, has brought the nations nearer to one an- 
other physically than ever before, yet closes on the tableau of 
their spiritual separation — each armed to the teeth and fear- 
fully watching the others, anxious to outstrip them not in great- 
ness but in bigness. The Nineteenth Century has set aside the 
ideals of the eighteenth, but I dare to hope it has not destroyed 



WITH AN APOLOGIA FOR NOT BEING PRO-GERMAN T>7 

them. They will return — but purified of whatever dross of false 
idealism was in them, and more equated to the facts of life. 
But let it be remembered that Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, 
do not belong to the world of facts but to the world of ideals. 
They are the way man's aspiration shapes the facts, as man's 
will cuts tunnels through the dumb mountains and lays cables 
beneath the blind seas. 

"The Nineteenth Century's own idols have not proved so 
worshipful as it imagined. If the Press diffuses light, it can 
also — as Bismarck discovered — diffuse darkness. If Science 
as a maid-of-all-work is a success, Science as an interpreter of 
the mystery of the Universe is a dismal failure. Even her im- 
mense practical boons only serve to amplify our senses and 
increase our speed : they cannot increase our happiness. Giants 
suffer as well as dwarfs, and the soul may sit lonely and sad, 
surrounded by mechanical miracles. 

"As ever, the soul is the true centre of things, and if America 
remembers this, she may steer safely through the immense 
spiritual perils of the coming century towards her old goal of a 
noble democracy, and may yet point the true path of civiliza- 
tion to the feudal nations and exhibit the divine element in 
the long procession of the centuries." 

XXI 

Of these ideas "The Melting Pot" was but a dramatic 
expansion. " A fig for your feuds and vendettas ! Germans 
and Frenchmen, Irishmen and Englishmen, Jews and Rus- 
sians — into the Crucible with you all. God is making the 
American!" 1 And David Quixano, the young musician, 

1 The play, so fatuously suppressed by the Foreign Office, has become al- 
most a text-book in many American schools and colleges and is constantly 
performed by their dramatic societies. As I write, I receive a letter from a 
school-mistress in Connecticut who says: "My pupils love the story and 
quotations, and we often recite the last glorious outburst 'What a seething 
and a bubbling! Celt and Latin, etc' Oh, it is splendid to see the little 
Citizens — Latins, Celts, Jews and Gentiles, all repeat it understandingly." 



38 SOME PROGNOSTICATIONS AND A PREFACE 

whose family had been swallowed up in the Kishineff po- 
grom, told the comfortable cultured Europe-apers : 

"You look back on Europe as a pleasure-ground, a palace 
of art. But I know it is sodden with blood, red with bestial 
massacres!" 

("Romantic claptrap this," according to Mr. Walkley, the 
dramatic critic; there are signs he knows better now.) 
But it was in vain that my young idealist, raising hands of 
benediction towards the Western sky, and his yet more 
glamorous vision, prayed: 

"Peace, Peace to all ye unborn millions, fated to fill this giant 
Continent — the God of our children give you Peace!" 

Under the slogan of "Preparedness" America is now seething 
with incipient Prussianism, and announcing with the first 
fine careless rapture of discovery that "to ensure peace 
you must prepare for war!" Para helium, forsooth. Para 
cerebellum! Poor simple souls ! So this fallacy, like the con- 
fidence trick, is perennial, needing only a constant renewal 
of fools. 

"I know that maxim — it was made in hell, 
This wealth of ships and guns inflames the vulgar 
And makes the very war it guards against. 
How often, as the Master said, the sight 
Of means to do ill deeds makes ill deeds done." l 

And so the most peace-loving country in the world is to 
have the second largest navy, and in time no doubt "the 
largest on earth." I agree with Lord Rosebery in lamenting 
this victory of Ahriman in America. 

1 "The War God," Act I. 



WITH AN APOLOGIA FOR NOT BEING PRO-GERMAN 39 

XXII 

En passant I may remark on the shallowness of the con- 
tention that the emergence of the "hyphenated" American 
during the war has destroyed the " Melting Pot" thesis. 
It is true Americans from the Fatherland have suddenly 
resumed the German, even to the point of abetting criminal 
plots against the Allies. But this is no more a disproof of 
the fusing process than — if I may use a vulgar image — sea- 
sickness is a disproof of digestion. An abnormal condition 
has simply counteracted the process. Sympathy with their 
country in its hour of trial has given these American Ger- 
mans a violent centrifugal pull which counteracts the cen- 
tripetal pull of America. But their re-assertion of race has 
only made the majority of Americans more conscious than 
ever of their Americanism, more determined than ever to 
be a non-European and politically homogeneous people. 
I say politically homogeneous because the actual physical 
fusion is a long process and is not even necessary, any more 
than it is necessary in Britain for Welshmen to marry 
Highland women or countesses to wed costermongers. 

That Americans have forgotten " that their chief and only 
allegiance was to the great Government under which they 
live" is, said President Wilson, "the only thing within our 
borders that has given us grave concern in recent months." 
The attempts — as yet happily defeated — to bring back 
America to the wretched divisions of the world it has left 
behind; to call in the Old World to upset the balance of the 
New, is only another of the proofs of the unrelaxing per- 
sistence of the sea of evil to dash itself against the dykes 
of good in that ceaseless war for the world, which consti- 
tutes the great cosmic drama. 1 

1 Canada, it should not be forgotten, is only second as a "Melting Pot" 
to the United States, and the effect of the war upon Teutonic blood there is 



40 SOME PROGNOSTICATIONS AND A PREFACE 

XXIII 

The "War Devil" which opens this volume and which 
unlike all the other war-pieces was written before the war 
(having appeared indeed in such Continental organs as the 
Neue Freie Presse of Vienna simultaneously with its ap- 
pearance in the Daily Chronicle in April, 1913), does not, 
unfortunately, need the faintest modification now that its 
outlook has been so wretchedly vindicated. That neither 
Hague Palaces of Peace nor ever-mounting Armaments 
would suffice to keep the world's peace unless Reason and 
Love set to work to untie the world's knots, was a conclusion 
that sentimentalists did not like to face, believing as they 
do in short cuts to the Millennium. I differ further from 
Mr. Carnegie in holding that a mechanical millennium is 
not only not possible but also not desirable. There are 
worse devils than even the War Devil, and I said so plainly 
both in this article and in the lyric "Lament" which was 
published in the first number of the Daily News and Leader, 
and had the enthusiastic endorsement of the late Watts- 
Dunton. Your modern thinker — he goes so fast nowadays 
he is a futurist rather than a contemporary — has always 
failed to allow for the element of truth or necessity in 
ancient institutions — from Capitalism to Christianity, 
from war to sex-segregation. The attack insufficiently 
prepared by a superficial analysis naturally fails: is indeed 
justly bafned by the immortal residuum. In "the Next 

shown by the fact that the inhabitants of Berlin (Ontario), who are mostly 
of German descent, petitioned to change the name of their town! The 
Ukrainians, a more recent immigration, yet numerous enough to support ten 
newspapers in Ukrainian, enlisted more freely than they were accepted, since 
it was feared their hatred to Russia might not yet be sufficiently melted. 
See their national organ Svoboda for February 29, 1916, published in Jersey 
City, in an idiom of which an old Russian order characteristically remarked: 
"There never was, is not, and cannot be any Ukrainian language." 



WITH AN APOLOGIA FOR NOT BEING PRO-GERMAN 4 1 

War" — provoked by the shower of premature prophecies 
that this would be the last, that it was "a war to end war"— 
an attempt is made at a more exhaustive analysis of the 
causes of war than Pacifists 1 (who, according to Dr. Me- 
lamed's learned Theorie, Ur sprung, und Geschichte der 
Friedensidee, have declaimed against it for 2500 years) 
have ever troubled to make. 

As wind and fire and water have shaped the lands so war 
has shaped their distribution among the peoples. As the 
rain-gauge records rain so history records blood. Yet 
Canon Gore finds the cause of the present war in Europe's 
materialism and selfishness (as if the Kaiser's inspiration 
was not theological), for Dr. R. A. Cram it is due to our 
inability to build Gothic Cathedrals (as if the Cathedral 
Ages were bloodless) and Professor Hobhouse traces it to 
the modern cult of lawlessness in art and life, even in Berg- 
son's rehabilitation of instinct against reason; as if Prussian 
militarism was not precisely the glorification of law and 
order, of reason made mechanical. The analysis of war and 
politics is continued in the articles on "The Levity of War 
Politics," "The Absurd Side of Alliances," "The Military 
Pacifists," "The Ruined Romantics," "Some Apologists 
for Germany," and "The War for the Words," all of which 
articles grew out of the attempt to write this Preface to a 
much smaller book, and had finally to be given their own 
way as separate entities. "Paradise Lost" on the other 
hand was my first thought when the war broke out — it has 
been already published in several places — notably in King 
Albert's Book. Patriotism and Percentage is in a lighter 
vein, an old satire of mine, dating from 1904, and more 

1 1 must head off at once the critic who would ignore the contents of this 
book, by a digression proving the right word is " Pacificist." But " Pazifist" 
is used in Germany and "Pacifiste" in French, and we must accept this 
short form only as a war-economy. 



42 SOME PROGNOSTICATIONS AND A PREFACE 

than once republished. Its object was to show the absurd 
tangle that had resulted from the separate evolutions of 
internationalism and nationalism, and since we are now 
again talking tariffs, I have reprinted its companion satire 
of Protectionism in the States. In pursuance of the same 
line of satiric suggestion I wrote to the Times in 1909 sug- 
gesting that as the new German Dreadnoughts, which 
were supposed to be aimed against us, could not be built 
without the new German loan of forty millions, it was 
treasonable for any British subject, banker or stockbroker 
to take part in it. This was of course a hit at our British 
policy of muddling along intellectually, but in Germany 
it was received as a piece of disgusting Chauvinism; a 
reception recalling in a humble way the fury in France over 
Gilbert's lines in which a certain gallant British skipper 
explains why he sailed away before a French frigate : 

" For to fight a French fal-lal 
Is like hitting of a gal 
And a lubberly thing for to do." 

XXIV 

Reviewing my "War Devil" with handsome compli- 
ments, Mr. William Archer in an article called "Love, 
Reason and War" nevertheless boggled at my formula of 
"Reason and Love," and confessed himself "disappointed 
at the inert pessimism of the conclusion." For, he urged, 
if "Love," or a "passionate sense of brotherhood must 
possess us before we can exorcise the War Devil, there is 
no ray of hope on the horizon ... for the present state 
of tension must certainly snap long before 'a passionate 
sense of brotherhood' can ripen to relax it; and a world- 
war would effectually crush and ruin whatever tender 
shoots of world-fraternity may now be germinating here 



WITH AN APOLOGIA FOR NOT BEING PRO-GERMAN 43 

and there." He thought therefore that the war could and 
should be staved off by some more rational means than 
Love. 

It will be seen that the "inert pessimism" must now be- 
long to Mr. Archer, for despite the world-war I do not 
believe "the passionate sense of brotherhood" so remote, 
indeed it not seldom reaches across the opposing trenches. 
I am not thinking merely of the Christmas truce. One 
hears on all sides of the friendly relations set up between 
English and Turks, between English and Prussians even. 
At Souchez, so an officer back from the trenches told a 
friend of mine, the Prussians actually utter a warning shout 
to our men when their Minenwerfer menaces. The artillery 
being of course remote and impersonal shares the apathy or 
hatred of the civilian, but the men who are brought into 
living touch (strange words) with one another have the 
comradeship easily passing into affection that comes to all 
those who go through common danger. Were the animosity 
between the French and German real — as real as between, 
say, Balkan neighbors — how could we possibly explain 
that astonishing episode recorded by Lord Northcliffe in his 
vivid narrative of Verdun — when through a rapid thaw 
"the parapets melted and subsided and two long lines 
of men stood up naked as it were before each other," and 
"the French and German officers turned their backs" 
while "the men on each side rebuilt their parapets without 
firing a single shot." Supposing to fire would have meant 
"wholesale murder" what else were they out for? Who has 
ever heard of two rival dogs that when their chains broke 
waited to be fastened up again? * 

Mr. Archer thinks that Reason is enough. But Reason 

1 1 asked a young relative of mine back from Gallipoli how he could find 
it in his heart to kill Turks — a people he had never seen before. " I felt I was 
killing Germans," he replied simply. 



44 SOME PROGNOSTICATIONS AND A PREFACE 

may tell us what should be done, it supplies no motive- 
power for doing it. If Love without Reason is fruitful in 
folly, Reason without Love is altogether sterile. Only by 
Reason and Love united can we untie our knots. What 
comes of trying to run the world by Unreason and Hate 
my lines on "The Place of Peace" sufficiently indicate. 

I was startled to find that Tolstoy in his secret Diary 
published in Russia this January uses the same formula as 
was laid down in my article of 19 13. In Reason and Love 
he too finds the only practicable alternative to the present 
governance of Society. 1 The coincidence is the more pe- 
culiar since Tolstoy unfortunately preferred to base his 
teaching upon Biblical texts. "Reason and Love" is a 
better basis. Not only can the Devil quote Scripture for 
his own purposes, but large sections of people are repelled 
by quotations professing a supernatural authoritativeness. 
Moreover, elasticity is lost. Tolstoy, for example, finding 
the text "Thou shalt not kill," leapt to annex it as an im- 
movable basis for Pacifism. "Reason and Love" however 
might very well say sometimes: "Thou shalt kill." Not 
to mention that a score of Biblical texts say so likewise. 
Mr. Archer in shying at the word "Love" was only a child 
of the age before the war. The dry distrust of emotion was 
perhaps due to the supposed Shavian philosophy, though a 
quarter of a century ago I remember Shaw telling a Fabian 
audience how he cried, when he first came up to London, 
to think of all the misery and was persuaded he would es- 
tablish Socialism in a fortnight. But I remain unregener- 

1 Our world is governed by violence — that is, by hatred. Therefore the 
majority of those who constitute society, its dependent, weakly members — 
women, children, and the unintelligent — are reared by malignity and join 
the ranks of hatred. But if the world were governed by Reason and Love, 
then this majority would be reared in Love and would join its ranks. To this 
end Reason and Love must persistently assert their existence. — Tolstoy's 
Diary. 



WITH AN APOLOGIA FOR NOT BEING PRO-GERMAN 45 

ate; I am quite aware that the word "Love" is fly-blown, 
and like the grand old name of gentleman, " soiled with all 
ignoble use." Nevertheless 

"Love is and was my Lord and King," 

and I abide by my formula. 

Cecil Rhodes thought that if there was a God — which 
was doubtful — he would want the world to be all English — 
that was certain. This is always how the overflowing 
energy of a great people manifests itself. Bulwer Lytton 
said every man was a patriot for the best of all reasons — ■ 
his country had produced him. The true patriot cannot 
imagine the world-spirit desiring to produce any other 
types. The late Max O'Rell told me that to a Parisian it 
seemed comic that anybody should not be a Frenchman. 
Pan-Germanism is therefore no abnormal dream. Austria's 
old motto ran: "Austria? est imperare orbi universe 1 " But 
it is not more magniloquent than our own Rule, Britannia, 

"All thine shall be the subject main, 
And every shore it circles, thine." 

And this "elan vital" for Empire is sophisticated by the 
poets and orators as Virgil moralized the Roman clutch for 
the world: 

" T11 regere imperio populos, Romane, memento; 
Hae tibi erunt artis, pacisque imponere morem, 
Par cere subjectis et debcllare superbos." 

But the God of Reason and Love desires the world to be 
neither British nor German. 

XXV 

The Reform Club of New York has presented to President 
Wilson a memorandum as to the needs of the various coun- 



46 SOME PROGNOSTICATIONS AND A PREFACE 

tries for ports or markets, which needs constitute the main 
driving-forces towards war. Not one but could be equitably 
supplied by mutual arrangement to the advantage of the 
world at large. Across these commercial needs cut however 
the racial yearnings and national ideals, but even these 
could be adjusted by Reason and Love, which could at least 
remove all inequalities and oppressions everywhere; in 
which case much fanatical and purposeless patriotism would 
be peacefully absorbed by superior Kulturen, and the nerve 
of nationality would be dulled. Those who suppose an 
acute sense of nationality would continue to co-exist with 
"World-Peace" want to have their cake and eat it too. 
There would be just such differences as subsist between 
Italian towns to-day, no two alike, yet the civic conscious- 
ness purged (or despoiled) of the wild flavor of the days 
when Pisa fought Genoa, Siena Florence, or Pavia Ravenna. 

XXVI 

Although in "Militarism, British and Prussian," I defend 
the British sub-conscious and defensive variety of militarism 
against Mr. Bernard Shaw's identification of it with the 
true or Prussian variety, I had already suggested in "The 
War Devil" that there is still too much Khaki in our 
cosmos. Our civilization, though pacific and industrial and 
free from military swagger, still revolves round a Court 
conceived on the old military models, and atavistic in its 
pageantry and its sympathies. Hence the disrespect for 
science and letters, and education, which revenges itself 
ironically when in a war of chemists the chemist is displaced 
or ruled by the Colonel. The Kaiser was made an Admiral 
of the Fleet, just as the Tsar has now been made a Field 
Marshal. Science will not come to its own till a foreign 
monarch is made F. R. S., which when you come to think 



WITH AN APOLOGIA FOR NOT BEING PRO-GERMAN 47 

of it is the only appropriate title for him. A Pension List 
like ours for Literature and Science — "To Mrs. T. K. 
Cheyne in consideration of the services of her husband, the 
late Professor Cheyne, to Biblical criticism, and of her 
straitened circumstances, £30 — " suggests rather the Re- 
public of Andorra or San Marino than the greatest Empire 
the world has ever seen. There is neither a Minister of 
Fine Arts as there is even in Belgium, nor is there a National 
Theatre to exalt the national temper or to rescue the drama 
from under the unclean thumb of the Syndicate. Even 
in the Lord Chamberlain's office one stumbles on colonels, 
and when "The Next Religion" was prohibited I had to 
discuss theology with colonels, of the verbally uninspired 
kind that corrected Gilbert's "chambers fit for a lord" into 
"chambers fit for a heaven," it being an office instruction 
that "Lord" was a theological term. As the horizon ac- 
cording to Sydney Smith was — when a certain lady ap- 
peared — clouded with majors, so is the horizon of the 
British Government darkened with colonels, gentle and 
honest as Colonel Newcome, but also as inefficient. They 
are Colonels even in the War Office. 

XXVII 

And it is perhaps because they are there — instead of 
plain business men — that it is so difficult to help one's 
country. At the very outbreak of the war I indicated to a 
Cabinet Minister of my acquaintance a serious defect in 
one of our munitions — of which I had been specially in- 
formed — and my letter was neatly docketed. When the 
War Office was clamoring for men, I asked it to sanction 
the raising of a Jewish Foreign Legion, similar to the Zion 
Mule Corps which was doing so brilliantly at the Dar- 
danelles and the commander of which was cabling me in 



48 SOME PROGNOSTICATIONS AND A PREFACE 

the spirit of Oliver Twist, and again the request was ac- 
knowledged. Finally I drew attention in the most authori- 
tative quarter to a most important new invention, which 
might not impossibly make the whole difference between 
defeat and victory and which was patriotically offered to 
the Government without a farthing of royalty. This 
time — so dire was the need — it looked as if something would 
be done and the thing was pushed in many directions and 
by many influences. Yet six months passed without result! 
Outraged, I made a supreme effort. A Cabinet Minister 
assured me everything would be done to help me. I re- 
plied indignantly that it was I who was trying to help the 
country. I was now invited to the War Office, courteously 
received by colonels. Things happened — and then again 
silence! The inventor's nerves broke down at last and 
at the sick bed we both abandoned the hope of helping 
such a country. Four months later and with practically 
no further effort from outside the invention was to some 
extent taken up! Now of course either it is a useless 
invention and should not have been taken up even 
now, or it is supremely important, and the delay was 
criminal. The inventor, instead of being prostrated and 
almost killed off should have been imprisoned by our anx- 
ious country in a palace, with black slaves to gratify every 
wish, and attendant mechanicians waiting with motor-cars 
to bear off the perfected pattern as soon as it was finally 
tested. Imagine the Germans having the chance of such 
an invention! "Almost," I say to the War Office, "almost 
thou persuadest me to be pro- German." The Government 
offices have now abandoned red tape for white, which is 
more economical. Let us hope, it is also symbolical. 1 But 
it would be unfair not to admit that with a War Office 

1 Compare the amusing chapter on "Olympus" in The First Hundred 
Thousand, by Ian Hay 



WITH AN APOLOGIA FOR NOT BEING PRO-GERMAN 49 

adapted for a "Contemptible Little Army" called on sud- 
denly to cater for millions, it has done better than could 
have been expected. Not to mention that in this instance 
professional scientific jealousies may have sub-consciously 
impeded, for as Hazlitt says: The unavoidable aim of all 
corporate books of learning is not to grow wise, and to 
teach, but to prevent anyone here from being or seeming 
wiser than themselves. 



XXVIII 

If we are to get away from the colonels it must not be 
merely by calling in science to help organize war as Professor 
Armstrong demands — indirectly as intellect would thus 
profit in the scale of recognition once it was mobilized for 
war. There must be a complete " trans- valuation of 
values." Sir William Tilden demands more honors for 
science and that the Presidents of Scientific bodies should 
be ex officio members of the Privy Council. Even this 
suggestion, excellent as it is, does not go far enough. What 
we have to do is to recognize the emergence of a modern 
pacific, industrial civilization from the outworn militarist 
State by a new set of social symbols and a transference of 
honors to the leaders of the new organism. Otherwise 
Prussians remain potential in the germ everywhere. This 
is a reform I have often advocated. Here for example is a 
speech made by me in the last century to a Business 
Club — the date is not noted, but admirers of Lord Rosebery 
may trace it from the allusion to him, which shows him 
more in-seeing than most politicians. 

"When'I find Lord Rosebery pointing out to his nation that 
the silent campaigns of commerce are at least as decisive of the 
fate of nations as the noisy operations of the battlefield, I feel 



5<D SOME PROGNOSTICATIONS AND A PREFACE 

that here is a point of view which mere politicians rarely occupy. 
When I read that since we conquered Egypt and the Soudan 
our exports to those places have gone down by a half, and that 
Germany and America are already preparing to munch the 
chestnuts we have pulled out of the fire in South Africa, I 
suspect that possibly life is not all blood and khaki. Perhaps 
we are really at death-grips with Germany, for example, though 
nominally at peace. And Germany, we are told, conducts her 
commercial campaign as scientifically as a military campaign, 
while England conducts her military campaign as unscien- 
tifically as a commercial campaign. Lord Rosebery deduces 
that both campaigns should be conducted with equal science. 
My more ignorant literary imagination takes a wilder flight and 
deduces that both campaigns should be put on an equal footing of 
honor and dignity: if indeed the victories of peace are not su- 
perior in glory to the victories of war. For, if we look facts 
in the face, we must see that the modern world is not the ancient 
world nor the mediaeval world. We must not be deluded and 
enslaved by the phrases and the ideals that belonged to a primi- 
tive world minus steam and electricity. In applying the old 
military methods to the solution of modern political problems, 
we may be as antiquated and out-of-date as we should be in 
using the tactics or weapons of Wellington in a modern battle. 
We may come to recognize that even as the spasms and convul- 
sions of Nature, though she works through them, are less im- 
portant than the slow silent everyday forces, so History is now 
made less by the fire and sword of the fighters than by the 
humble prosaic activities of the stay-at-homes. Even if we 
regard the fighters as the best means of expressing the na- 
tional force in a crisis, let us remember that it is the national 
force that they express: for since they themselves are in every 
sense a destructive not a productive element, the very pos- 
sibility of an effective fighting force rests upon the commercial 
prosperity of the country. The commercial army thus not only 
fights on its own account with the commercial armies of other 
nations, but it sustains and feeds its own military army. Not 
upon the playing-fields of Eton are our victories won, but in the 



WITH AN APOLOGIA FOR NOT BEING PRO-GERMAN 5 1 

factories of Manchester, and the mines of Newcastle, and the 
shipyards of the Clyde. Nay more. My literary misunder- 
standing of English history convinces me that not by soldiers 
has our great Empire been built up, but by Trading Companies, 
India by the East India Company, Canada by the Hudson Bay 
Fur Company, South Africa by mining companies. And this 
is why it seems to my foolish literary simplicity that at least 
as much glory and prestige should attach to the commercial 
branch of the Army, as to the military branch of the Army, and 
that the portraits of the captains of industry should be in every 
shop-window. But when, gentlemen, I see Parliament voting 
for the rival branch of the service a hundred millions without 
turning a hair, while it becomes apoplectic at a request for a 
million or two for your side, for technical education, let us say, 
then I despair of ever understanding anything about politics. 
I am afraid nothing will be done till you manage to invest your 
branch with something of the glamor of your rivals. 

"You, too, must take the popular imagination with splendid 
symbols. You, too, must have flags and banners, uniforms and 
bands and patriotic processions. Already mafficking rhymes 
with trafficking. Our poets have missed their opportunity. Com- 
merce must get a laureate: not the sort of bard whose panegyrics 
of dog-biscuits and cherry-brandy may be found on the hoard- 
ings, but one who will perceive the pulse of true greatness in 
the throb of the machine-room. For my prosaic part, much 
as I admire the soldier who plods uncomplainingly the dusty 
road of duty and death, I cannot see that the humble factory- 
hand does less for England and the Empire. He, too, may be 
mutilated by machinery, but though he may not be compen- 
sated by a little pension, he has not the compensating con- 
sciousness of honorable scars, of wounds gained in his country's 
cause. Why not? Is duty heroic only when it is clad in khaki 
and accompanied by a band? Why have the fighting classes 
the monopoly of the motto that 'England expects every man 
to do his duty? ' Why is it not hung up in workshops to counter- 
act the teaching of the Trade-Unions that it is wrong to do an 
honest day's work? 



52 SOME PROGNOSTICATIONS AND A PREFACE 

"And, developing this thought of the commercial Army in 
my ignorant literary way, I ask why under the guise of strikes 
and lockouts are our commercial battalions allowed to fire at 
one another, to the destruction of England and the Empire? 
We have heard much of Little-Englanders, but how about the 
Little-Imperialists, those who look only on the big drum side 
of the Empire and disregard the commercial side, to say noth- 
ing of the artistic and intellectual sides, which also form part 
of the greatness of a nation, as distinguished from the greatness 
of a pack of wolves or a hive of bees! Gentlemen, let us educate 
our schoolboys in true Imperialism — to feel that whichever 
army they enter they are equally serving their country, and that 
the medals won at Exhibitions are as glorious as those won on 
the battlefield. As every line drawn from the centre of a circle 
to the circumference is equal, so within the circle of the com- 
munity is every faithful service alike honorable." 

XXIX 

If Reason and Love had only been applied to the Woman 
Question — that sex War for the World with which one 
section of this book is occupied ! In that case how much suf- 
fering and folly would have been avoided. Reason would 
have shown that social and economic changes had altered the 
status of woman, and Love would have hastened to register 
the new status by the vote. But the army of the East — 
with its predilection for the harem — has insisted that the 
army of the West must hack its way through. This is 
much more "a war to end war" than the war against 
Germany, for when co-partnership replaces the male 
hegemony, it is questionable if the female principle — which 
is the creative principle — will so lightly tolerate destruction. 
The ironic and unnatural introduction of the male principle 
of militancy into the campaign for female rights is studied 
in two of my chapters, the first of which appeared in the 



WITH AN APOLOGIA FOR NOT BEING PRO-GERMAN 53 

Fortnightly Review and the second in the English Review, 
and they are followed by three papers (from the Daily 
Chronicle) on "The War and the Women" and concluded 
by a speech of my own before the United Suffragists at 
Kingsway Hall, demanding the instant concession of votes 
for women. It is but one of many speeches I have made in 
this ungrateful cause, and after all that its advocates have 
gone through and after having myself for years passed in 
the London Clubs as a pitifully disordered intellect, once 
so promising, I read with annoyance rather than with 
satisfaction the fulsomely honeyed language of the Times, 
hailing woman as "the primum mobile of a world in the 
making," or the bland suggestion of the Daily Mail that 
our affairs would really go far better, were half the Cabinet 
women. They seem preparing not merely to turn their 
coats but to turn them into bodices. For my part I feel 
that anti-suffrage journalists should not make such state- 
ments save with bell and candle, and wrapped in their 
own sheets. 

XXX 

In " The War Devil" I recalled the theory of Jean de Bloch 
that modern war must end in stalemate. His theory was 
perhaps imprinted on my mind by the accident of my hav- 
ing made his acquaintance. The late Dr. Herzl, the founder 
of Zionism, it was who brought us together and I remember 
an evening with both of them in a box at a London theatre, 
where a beautiful actress played in a popular play, to the 
bewilderment of Bloch who could not understand why the 
actress was celebrated or the play popular. It was his first 
introduction to our wonderful stage. "Elle n'est pas fine," 
he said and refused to be introduced to the beautiful one, 
lest he should have to pay her a compliment, which he felt 
was beyond his means, millionaire though he was. Any- 



54 SOME PROGNOSTICATIONS AND A PREFACE 

thing but a visionary, you see, this little Polish-Jewish 
Banker, railway constructor and administrator, and writer 
on finance and economics, surely the mildest-mannered man 
that ever took a trench, even on paper. That Tsar Nich- 
olas II should have established the Hague Conference under 
his inspiration seemed much more natural than that he 
should be the most learned authority on modern warfare. 
But so far he has proved — as Mr. Philip Snowden said in 
the House the other day — "uncannily right." And when 
within three months of its inception the war began to show 
unmistakable signs of going his way, I tried to remind my 
fellow-citizens of the contents of his great work, The War 
of the Future, which, published in six volumes in Russia 
in 1898, and at that time stirring considerable interest 
everywhere, seemed already to have been forgotten. The 
occasion arose through a Times misrepresentation of the 
activities of my friend Mr. Jacob Schiff of New York, a 
noble figure, whose loathing of the carnage and whose 
yearning for "Perpetual Peace" were attributed to his 
being a "German agent," and holding "a brief for Ger- 
many." 

XXXI 

Cursed be the Peace-Makers for they shall be called pro- 
German. This new reading of the Beatitude had already 
begun and it has since been applied with an absence of 
humor that is amazing even in war-time. A Nobel Peace- 
Prizeman who protested against the destruction of Europe 
has actually been represented (and by a socialist paper) 
as a puppet, timed by the Kaiser. One would have thought 
the devil out of hell would have been softened by all the 
slaughter to consider whether the same results might not 
now be achieved without any more of it. As the Paris 
correspondent of the Times wrote the other day, "Any 



WITH AN APOLOGIA FOR NOT BEING PRO-GERMAN 55 

man, be he private citizen or Minister, with power to hasten 
even by a day, the successful end of this necessary but 
awful carnage, and who does not bend his every thought 
and effort to that end, is unworthy of his birthright as a 
civilized being." Happening to be the child of two great 
civilizations, and beginning to fear that the most awful 
part of the carnage might be its futility, I took the oppor- 
tunity (while suggesting that since peace was inevitable 
some day, Europe had better try to reach it at once by the 
Conference Mr. Scruff was proposing) to add in the same 
letter to the Times a synopsis of Bloch's book. The date 
of my letter was November 26th, 1914. I do not know 
whether the Germans would at so early a date have ac- 
cepted a Conference, but when one recalls what agonies 
and calamities the world has suffered since, one wonders 
more than ever why the arbitrament of reason is universally 
commended, while the sword is yet undrawn, but becomes 
almost a treasonable suggestion after the mischief of the 
sword is hideously visible. Particularly does it seem a part 
of that levity of war-politics to which I have devoted a 
couple of chapters, that the Times should have omitted 
from my letter the Bloch synopsis, though it was pro- 
fessedly taken from Harmsworth's Encyclopcedia. As if 
not as much light as possible, but as little as possible, should 
be thrown upon the transcendently tragic situation. The 
synopsis of Bloch ran as follows: 

"War between the great powers, such, for example, as be- 
tween the Dual and Triple Alliance, is no longer possible as 
the arbiter of international disputes. Bloch points out (1) that 
the two great alliances are nearly equal in combined numbers, 
wealth, discipline, and moral qualities; (2) that modern weapons 
and tactical methods have so developed that the defensive force 
has gained an immense increment of strength which enables 
small bodies of men to defend a widely-extended front against 



56 SOME PROGNOSTICATIONS AND A PREFACE 

superior numbers of the enemy for a protracted period; and 
(3) that the frontiers are now fortified on a most complete 
scale, and behind them are vast plains which the spade and 
magazine rifle can turn into impregnable fortresses. From these 
considerations he deduces that modern wars will be long wars, 
and must necessarily result in economic exhaustion, entailing 
starvation and the dislocation of the social fabric. At best 
they will result in a 'kind of stalemate,' with no decisive 
issue." 

Despite the Times' preference for darkness, that Rosa 
Dartle curiosity of the minor press, which is usually such a 
curse, became a blessing, furnishing me with opportunities 
of pointing the Bloch moral. Thus to the inquisitiveness 
of the Weekly Dispatch, as to what had most struck me 
during the war, I was able to reply (it was now the Spring 
of 191 5) that it was the continued exemplification of Bloch's 
theories. (What most struck me about the other replies 
was that Lord Derby, of the immortal recruiting crusade, 
could see nothing more striking in the most gigantic 
phenomenon in human history than "the mutual devotion 
of officers and men.") 

At the end of the first year of war the same newspaper 
habit provided another opportunity of summing up the 
situation and the prospect. Under date of August 4, 191 5, 
I wrote in The Evening Standard — and was again alone in 
the view: 

"I know nothing of military matters, but if one may go by 
Bloch — instead of Belloc — that great military writer proclaimed 
that owing to the possibilities of trench warfare, in which one 
man can hold back six, a war between two modern Powers, 
equally organized and equipped, can only result in stalemate. 

"This deadlock actually exists on the West front, where 
Germany's only gains have been those of the first rush against 
an unprepared foe. It does not exist on the East front, because 



WITH AN APOLOGIA FOR NOT BEING PRO-GERMAN 57 

there Germany meets inferior organization, insufficient money 
and munitions, and internal discontent. 

"But unless Germany builds sufficient submarines to destroy 
our food supply, we can ultimately wear her out, though at a 
cost so terrible that I should personally prefer negotiating her 
out of France and Belgium." 

Finally in 191 6 came the bold and brilliant tribute of 
Mr. Wells and the speech in Parliament of Mr. Snowden, 
and Bloch may be said to have arrived. 

XXXII 

When his book was first published, a translation of one 
volume was issued in England under the title Is War Now 
Impossible ? And this of course became the legend of Bloch, 
who was also supposed — and Mr. G. K. Chesterton fell 
into the error only the other day — to be a moonshiny 
Pacifist. What Bloch did say was not that war was im- 
possible but that with modern munitions and trench 
methods a decisive war was impossible, so far as mere 
military operations went. In this sense it may already 
be said — to adapt Swinburne— 

" Like a god self-slain on his own strange altar 
War lies dead." 

In another sense no doubt Bloch did suggest that war was 
impossible — in the sense that we say this man or that 
woman is " impossible." In literal truth they are, alas! 
only too possible. That a people which had never ceased 
to chafe at paying its resourceless septuagenarians five 
shillings a week should carry on a war for two years at the 
cost of four or five million pounds a day and a colossal loss 
of life, property and shipping, without turning a hair — this 



58 SOME PROGNOSTICATIONS AND A PREFACE 

he might have well thought impossible. Even I who have 
lived to see it feel like saying "Credo quia impossibile est." 
But there is nothing in the imperturbable insanity of the 
human race to refute Bloch. A decisive war may be im- 
possible, but there is nothing to prevent two Kilkenny cats 
going on till there are only a few scraps of fur left — "a 
fight to a finish." 

Another factor, however, comes in — on the Bloch sys- 
tem — to modify the military stalemate. It is the econom- 
ical attrition by which one or the other will be worn out first. 
This is why the Huns rage. They have won the military 
part of the land-battles — forty years of gigantic prepara- 
tion and two years of heroic sacrifices merited no less — and 
they are infuriated at our taking no notice of their score. 
They want war to be a game with the definite old-fashioned 
rules, but it is we who are teaching them that the mere 
military Kriegspiel is out-of-date. And it is because they 
feel that though they can go no farther, they may fare 
worse, that they have long been anxious for a peace. This 
has even been categorically admitted — and that in a press 
under censorship — by the greatest organs of Germany. 
The Frankfurter Zeitung said at the end of this February: 
"We have declared before all the world our readiness for 
Peace." "We showed our enemies our will for Peace," 
said the Cologne Gazette about the same period. Even as 
long ago as last Christmas we had Herr Ballin lamenting 
the destruction of Europe. And in the leading Austrian 
newspaper, the Neue Freie Presse, Count Julius Andrassy, 
the former Hungarian Minister, said at the same sacred 
season: "The proceedings of the German as well as of the 
Hungarian Parliament show clearly that central Europe is 
ready to make an honorable peace on the strength of the 
present military situation. But our enemies hold quite a 
different position." 



WITH AN APOLOGIA FOR NOT BEING PRO-GERMAN 59 

XXXIII 

To hold a different position is quite legitimate and if 
Germany cannot now get out of the trap she laid for others, 
nobody can deny it is a righteous nemesis. But I am not 
at all sure that even England understands the transformed 
conditions of modern warfare and the full strength of her 
position, and how in the economic factor of war Germany 
stands as much beaten as Belgium does in the military 
aspect. England too has not entirely given up the German 
romantic idea of Kriegspiel; she wants before making peace 
also to have an old-fashioned victory, if only because — she 
says — Germany would understand no other. But Germany 
understands well enough. Think of the picture given us 
in the Matin of March 15 by Senhor Paes, the Portuguese 
Minister who had just been recalled from Berlin and who, 
if anyone, should be in a position to gauge the facts: 

"I have been witnessing for some months the profound 
change which has been taking place in certain circles which I 
have been called upon to frequent. The enthusiasm was great 
at the beginning of the war. The war was regarded as a sacred 
enterprise, a sort of emancipation of the civilized world. For 
some months the tone has been growing depressed. To-day in 
the same circles where the bellicose spirit formerly reigned one 
sees only weariness and regrets. The idea that Germany is 
the nation predestined to regenerate humanity has also disap- 
peared. Everywhere the Kaiser, when he visits hospitals, has 
but one phrase, always the same, in response to cries and com- 
plaints, "Ich habe das nicht gewollt" (I did not wish it). Now 
only peace is spoken of, and the necessity of concluding peace. 

"Note that these are circles which boast before the foreigner. 
If even among people who deliberately wanted war one hears 
such talk you can judge what is thought in the rest of the Em- 
pire and in the lower classes of society." l 

translated in the Times, March 16, 1916, under the title "Changed 
Berlin." 



60 SOME PROGNOSTICATIONS AND A PREFACE 

Consider too the message recently sent from Berlin to 
Stockholm as to the plight of the poorer classes. " Hunger 
is, generally speaking, the most powerful of the enemies of 
Berlin and Germany." (Daily Chronicle, March 25.) A 
neutral, Hjalmer Branting, tells Mr. Harold Begbie in the 
same organ that the nation is beginning to see that Force 
is not so supreme as it thought. "Everybody in the 
German Empire wants peace," said the Volksblalte simply, 
last December — and now comes the German Chancellor and 
tells us he expressed his readiness on December 9th to enter 
into peace negotiations while the German answer to Pres- 
ident Wilson's ultimatum goes out of its way to ingeminate 
peace ! 

XXXIV 

I am not unaware of the new forces we expect to be able 
to bring into play soon, both native and allied, nevertheless 
I wish I could feel sure that even a military victory — naval 
victories are rarely decisive — will bring us better terms than 
our economic victory already ensures us. Verdun has 
illustrated the Bloch theory afresh. With the most colossal 
artillery ever concentrated on one spot and with super- 
human sacrifices and valor Germany has at the moment 
of writing achieved little or nothing. People are able to 
grasp how this verifies Bloch, but they do not seem to see 
that what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. 
How is the French "Grand Offensive" to break through, 
any more than the German? The French author of The 
Epic of Dixmude tells us how "the French marines held 
back the German advance at the beginning of the war, 
when the odds were six to one." Why should not the Ger- 
mans in their turn do the same? "At the first battle of 
Ypres," Mr. Buchan tells us, "the thin Allied line, stretched 
to the last limits of endurance, beat back five times its 



WITH AN APOLOGIA FOR NOT BEING PRO-GERMAN 6 1 

weight of men and ten times its weight of guns." And 
again I ask, what guarantee is there the Germans will not 
do as much? Mr. Buchan says, indeed, that the Germans 
under such circumstances would soon lose their moral but 
as this would mean the complete destruction of Germany, 
I do not feel so persuaded that the beast at bay would be 
less dangerous than on the rampage. 

XXXV 

Again, when I speak of an economic victory, I mean by 
intelligent anticipation. With equal taps turned on in two 
barrels a firkin and a hogshead, one need not wait for the 
result to know which will be depleted first, and the Germans 
are clever enough not to desire vulgar demonstration. But 
if we force them to go on to the last drop, then even our 
own tun will not be so gloriously overflowing. 

Adam Smith, when it was pointed out to him, that on his 
theories England ought to have been ruined years ago, 
replied that a nation takes a deal of ruining. No less an 
authority than the Chairman of The Merchants' Trust 
has warned us that Germany will take a deal of ruining — 
after all, its barrel is the Great Tun of Heidelberg: — 

"Pitt's speeches are full of prognostications of her financial 
collapse, but France sustained a war of over twenty years, and 
it was not the forty-five milliards of assignats that finally stopped 
her. Theoretically, a country can carry on war provided produc- 
tion is equal to, and not less than, consumption by the Army, plus 
consumption by the civil population. So Germany might feed, 
clothe, and munition her soldiers, and struggle on long after 
financial experts, reasoning from the depreciation of the mark, 
had decreed her collapse, especially now that she is in possession 
of the industrial district of the Sambre in Belgium and France, 
and of Lodz in Poland, which has raised the proportion of pro- 
ducers to soldiers." 



62 SOME PROGNOSTICATIONS AND A PREFACE 

It should be added that Kitchener's original calculation 
that the Allies could increase their men while Germany's 
quantum was stationary, has been falsified by the accession 
of Bulgaria and Turkey — which are much more additions 
to the German army than Italy is to the Allied. A careful 
table of writings goes to show that the man-power of the 
enemy is relatively 15% more than in last June (U. D. C, 
January, 19 16). 

Mr. Buchan himself does not believe "that the war can 
end by mere attrition, by merely starving Germany into 
surrender." He thinks Germany will make a great naval 
dash. But if this fails — as fail it must — and Germany's 
informal peace-overtures are still neglected, and she sees 
bankruptcy and dismemberment facing her, then I cannot 
help fearing that we shall see worse devils raised than 
Germany has yet called from the vasty deep. Tacitus 
tells us — and he is corroborated by St. Ambrose — that the 
ancient Germans had such a passion for dicing that when 
everything else was gone they set their liberties and persons 
on the last throw (extremo ac novissimo jactu de libertate 
ac de cor pore contendant) . Who can tell to what desperate 
recourse their descendants may be driven? They may 
prefer to go down fighting to the death. Long ago the 
Kaiser picturesquely threatened to "arm every dog and 
cat in the Empire "; last December the Berlin Lokalanzeiger 
proposed imposing a year of service on all girls at eighteen, 
and recently Herr Rudolph Keller, a member of the Austrian 
House of Deputies, published a book called "War Against 
Civilians!" urging the starving of all the conquered terri- 
tories. The British prisoners and interned would anyhow 
be the first to be deprived of food. And could we complain? 
Could we complain even if the Zeppelins, ceasing to try for 
military targets, as I am convinced they have done hitherto, 
should establish themselves above a crowded city-quarter 



WITH AN APOLOGIA FOR NOT BEING PRO-GERMAN 63 

and rain down remorseless death? The marvellous British 
imperturbability might not indeed be shaken, and the bull- 
dog grip is not without its savage sublimity, and even its 
measure of justification in the prior " f rightfulness" of 
German policy. But the question is, can we — even though 
unalarmed — allow such horrors and holocausts when we 
have only to move a finger to ensure — in co-operation of 
course with our Allies — a satisfactory and an honorable 
peace? 

As the Swedish Foreign Minister, Mr. Knut Wollenberg, 
said to Mr. Begbie, there is Europe to be considered, there 
is civilization. I would add that it is not our business to 
exterminate even German militarism, much less Germany. 
If Germany prefers that soul-crushing system, it is her 
affair. To impose our Kultur on her would be to do exactly 
what we accuse her of desiring to do with other nations. Our 
business is simply to see that she does not impose her Kultur 
on us whether by conquest or infection. And this business 
it is by no means certain we are altogether minding. 

XXXVI 

When at the end of 1914 I wrote to the Times to endorse 
Mr. SchifT's proposition of a Conference, a mysterious and 
menacing "Member of the Vigilance Committee" hastened 
to point out in that organ how " curious" peace- talk was 
"just now when the Germans have failed to take Warsaw." 
Was he more content, I wonder, when my next essay at 
"peace- talk" was made after the Germans had succeeded 
in taking Warsaw? But perhaps this vigilant gentleman 
is still unaware of the message I sent to a Conference held 
at Caxton Hall on "The Pacifist Philosophy of Life," on 
July 8th, 1915, in a week when we were suffering 20.000 
casualties a week, and I was still credulous enough to think 



64 SOME PROGNOSTICATIONS AND A PREFACE 

that Christian nations might not be altogether deaf to the 
voice of Reason and Love: — 

"As you know (I wrote), I was among the first to stipulate 
that this conference should not be a 'Stop-the- war-meeting' and 
therefore I feel myself all the more entitled to protest against 
the Stop-the-peace-party. 

"From various German quarters peace voices seem to be 
raised with increasing frequency and the game of the Stop-the- 
peace-party is to pretend that to give ear to these voices is pro- 
German. That is poison gas tactics. So far does this disregard 
the decencies of discussion that it is probable this very con- 
ference, founded on the utter loathing and detestation of the 
Prussian ideal, will also be beclouded as pro-German. 

"A rabbi in New York said the other day, 'Nobody could 
read his morning paper without feeling as if his heart would 
break.' This from a neutral. 

"What must we feel, who, in addition to the spectacle of 
half the world murdering and impoverishing itself, see the flower 
of England massacred and mutilated at the rate of twenty 
thousand a week, and the whole economic future of generations 
to come, mortgaged and imperilled, not to mention the trans- 
formation of our free modern civilization into a killing ma- 
chine on the Prussian model. 

"Yet when we express the faintest desire to meet any over- 
tures that may arrest this spiritual and material disintegration, 
our conduct is so unintelligible forsooth that the only possible 
explanation can lie in our being pro-German. 

"When King Solomon wished to cut a child in two, it was the 
true mother that surrendered the child intact to the false 
mother; whether those who prefer the slaughter of their fellow 
citizens to negotiation are the truer patriots is a question that 
may be illumined by this ancient searchlight. 

"The reason alleged by the stop-the peace party for ignoring 
overtures through German channels is that they are veiled in- 
dications of Germany's weakness and distress. But what better 
moment for dealing with the devil than when he is sick? Surely 



WITH AN APOLOGIA FOR NOT BEING PRO-GERMAN 65 

it is not proposed to take up peace negotiations at the moment 
when Germany is carrying all before her. We should have done 
better, indeed, to encourage these overtures while Russia was 
still in Galicia, but even now the threads of negotiations could 
probably be picked up, and the Germans got out of Belgium 
and France by diplomacy, at least as quickly and effectively as 
by dynamite. 

"I base this belief on the German gospel of Real Politics. 
The Germans are not out for glory, but for solidities. They 
do not even profess to fight like England for the abstract sanc- 
tity of treaties and rights of nationalities. 

"It is very significant, that saying reported of Herr Behrens, 
director of the Dresden Bank, that Germany would lose even 
if she won. The shrewd business men who built up Prussia's 
marvellous prosperity and now see their mercantile marine 
eliminated, their oversea commerce dead, their colonies cap- 
tured, and vast markets for German products in England, 
France, Russia and Italy destroyed, will not indefinitely endure 
this orgie of militarism. 

"They see, even if we do not, that Jean de Bloch was a true 
prophet, and that modern warfare between two scientifically 
equipped powers can yield no decisive military result. 

"These Real Politicians understand, moreover, that no war 
indemnity, even in ultimate and improbable victory, could 
possibly compensate them for the widespread boycott that every 
month of war makes more certain and bitterer. 

"Surely we already hold enough of Germany's colonies, 
merchantmen and invested moneys not to come off second best 
in any negotiations. 

"I hope, therefore, we shall not lightly reject any reason- 
able parley, and that a way to peace may yet be found be- 
fore we enter on the second year of the most murderous, the 
most gigantic, the most barbarously conducted war in all 
history." 



66 SOME PROGNOSTICATIONS AND A PREFACE 

XXXVII 

Nearly a year has passed since this was written, but is 
there anything in the purely military situation calculated 
to give us better terms than we could then have secured, 
or so much better as to be worth the immense human agony and 
material destruction? For this is the real question. Our 
"Grand Offensive" is coming — it is nearly eighteen months 
since Frenchmen fresh from the trenches told me it was 
"just going to begin." "II n'est plus question" they said, 
u de notre entree a Berlin mais seulement des termes de paix 
que nous y dieter ons." So far our Grand Advance has been 
only in taxes and prices. But even if their cocksureness is 
about to be tardily justified, this question is not answered. 
Shall we indeed ever know whether the final terms will be 
so much better, than we could exact this very day by ne- 
gotiation with a superficially successful but commercially 
paralyzed, food-depleted, colony-despoiled and peace- 
clamoring Germany, as to have been worth the additional 
sacrifices? Those who have the responsibility for this 
gigantic gamble are not to be envied. But they ought to 
bear in mind the sinister currents of "patriotic" opinion 
that may be set going by the hundreds of factories both here 
and in Canada which our indefatigable Minister of Muni- 
tions has called into being. 1 And surely "negotiation" must 
after all play a large part in the settlement. Have we indeed 
done our duty by Belgium in not long ago negotiating the 
enemy out of her territory? "The cessation of the war," 
writes M. Henri Lambert, the famous Belgium economist, 
who is also a manufacturer, "is among Belgium's primary 

1 The hectic flush of prosperity also serves to keep our masses quiet — they 
neither understand the bad times that may come as after the Napoleonic 
wars nor make provision for them. " Five pounds a week! It does take 
a lot of spending," said a housewife wearily. In Canning Town nearly 
every baby — of two months even— sports a ring. 



WITH AN APOLOGIA FOR NOT BEING PRO-GERMAN 67 

interests," and he views with horror the prospect, so pleas- 
ing to Englishmen, of the evacuation of Belgium by force 
of arms and not by negotiation. " Every town, village and 
field in Belgium," would, this Belgian says, "be transformed 
into a scene of indescribable destruction and horrible slaugh- 
ter." And as to starving out the Germans, he adds "Does 
anybody imagine that the German nation will consent to 
be starved and to pick up the crumbs dropped from the 
table of the Belgians, themselves fed from other sources?" 
As for the common cry that South Africa would never give 
back this or Australia that, it may be true, but if so there 
is an end to the British Empire, in any sense such as Mr. 
Hughes tried to drive home to us. It would simply be a 
set of allied peoples, without inner unity, and were even the 
Imperial Council established that Adam Smith already pro- 
posed in The Wealth of Nations, there would still be no Im- 
perial organism. 

XXXVIII 

This is a matter in which outsiders can see more clearly 
than the Cabinet, just as it was left for the late Emil Reich 
to warn England in 1907 of the war which our statesmen 
did not provide against even in 19 14. So too the present 
Cabinet, engrossed with a multitude of petty details, can 
perhaps no longer see the tree for the twigs. When the 
Boer war was dragging its weary length along Lord Rose- 
bery created a sensation by suggesting in a speech that 
peace might grow out of "a casual conversation in an inn." 
Is there no way of starting negotiations without committing 
ourselves? Does the levity of war-politics go so far as to 
provide no instrument or device for such a situation as the 
present? One suggestion, made by me,* in the New States- 
man of November n, 191 5, and of course wholly neg- 
lected, may perhaps be usefully reprinted here. The 



68 SOME PROGNOSTICATIONS AND A PREFACE 

subject arose through a controversy on "Commemorating 
Miss Cavell." 

"With all deference to Mr. Shaw, and every desire that the 
sex Miss Cavell adorned shall be instantly enfranchised, I 
cannot feel sure that here lies the most appropriate 'way in 
which we can pay our debt to her and test the sincerity of her 
loudest champions.' The lesson of her life — and death — is 
surely larger than the vote, is nothing less than 'Patriotism is 
not enough.' She desired to die at peace even with her execu- 
tioners, and therefore we must prepare to live at peace with 
them. 

"Even from to-day's Daily Express I gather that Germany — 
ringed round by our victorious Fleet — is sick of the war, and 
resembles 'a war-maniac whose blood has been drained.' In 
the current number of War & Peace I find a German manifesto 
circulated last June by the Bund Neues Vaterland, urging that 
the Allies cannot be crushed, and that even if Belgium could 
be annexed, it would only create an appalling era of anti- 
German militarism. Months ago I read another manifesto, 
signed by a hundred and fifty of the greatest names in Germany, 
repudiating Bemhardi, and declaring: 'We Germans have never 
grudged our Anglo-Saxon blood-relations their world-encircling 
power,' and that the dread of Germany's designs was a 'de- 
lusion,' a 'disastrous misunderstanding.' 

"As one who shared this 'delusion,' and even incorporated 
it in a play, I feel I cannot better honor Miss Cavell's memory 
than by lending ear — however incredulous — to the hundred 
and fifty German thinkers and creators, for even more dis- 
astrous than the original misunderstanding would be to con- 
tinue it at the cost of incalculable suffering per minute. (In 
to-day's Times there are nearly two close-printed pages in tiny 
type of British casualties alone.) But if one suggests opening 
peace negotiations when Germany is winning, one is a coward 
and a traitor; and if one suggests it when Germany is not win- 
ning, one is still more clearly 'pro-German.' By these black- 
guardly tactics — repeated in every war — every approach to 



WITH AN APOLOGIA FOR NOT BEING PRO-GERMAN 69 

sanity is blocked with barbed wire. The trouble is that a dis- 
advantage does lie with the side that begins the peace talk. 

"It appears, therefore, that what is wanted in future wars is 
a monthly meeting or even a continuous intercourse of the 
rival diplomatists to discuss, quite without prejudice, the ever- 
changing military situation. Thus at any and every meeting 
they could slide into discussing peace conditions without either 
side being compromised by having called the conference. Let 
Miss Cavell's countrymen create even now this missing ma- 
chinery. Let the rival diplomatists begin meeting, not to talk 
peace, but to prepare the atmosphere in which it may become 
negotiable as the military situation develops. En attendant 
they can discuss such subjects as the exchange and treatment 
of prisoners. To end as I began — with a quotation from Mr. 
Shaw — ' If this proposal is received in dead silence I shall know 
that Edith Cavell's sacrifice has been rejected by her country.' " 



XXXIX 

Nobody is more conscious than I what large areas of the 
spiritual war-zone are left untouched here. There is for 
example a chapter to be written on the results of the war 
upon the relations between the white and colored races, but 
the fog of war lies too thickly about this war-zone for any 
real survey at present. I have contented myself with re- 
producing my old speech in honor of Mr. Morel, made in 
the days when his services in the Congo were acknowledged 
as a national glory, and Lord Cromer, Sir Arthur Conan 
Doyle and others partook in a public presentation to him. 
I could not re-read this speech without thinking of Old 
Testament dooms, though at the same time I rejoiced that 
King Albert has overlaid the black record of King Leopold 
and his henchmen by a nobly-illuminated page, and that 
while Germany has sunk into a Great Scourge, Belgium 
purged by pity and terror has risen into a Great Power, of 



70 SOME PROGNOSTICATIONS AND A PREFACE 

which even England can say, in the words of Thomson's 
Britain: 

" In spite of raging universal sway, 
And raging seas repress'd, the Belgic States, 
My bulwark on the Continent arose." 

Another chapter — or book — would deal with the effects 
on labor, apart from the woman question. Such a study 
has indeed been begun by Mr. G. D. H. Cole, under the 
title Labor in War Time, but it does not go beyond the 
passage of the Munitions Act, where the real excitement 
begins. I am not surprised to find him saying " It is scandal- 
ous that a measure vitally affecting the whole position of 
Labor should have been hurried through at a moment's 
notice ... it is still more a scandal that the Trade Union 
leaders and the Labor party should have acquiesced in it." 
Exactly what I have found all along the line — no real back- 
bone of liberty in the Briton, though plenty of fighting 
backbone. I note that Mr. Cole ends his book with a grave 
prophecy that " the coming of peace between nations means 
the coming of war between classes." This I am not in a 
position to refute, for if I have avoided this subject it is 
because I have limited myself to those regions of the war- 
zone in which I have been personally a fighter. On the move- 
ments for the emancipation of woman, for the rights and 
redintegration of the Jews, for the amelioration of our 
drama, for the freedom of emigration and the maintenance 
of the American ideal, for the classification of creeds, for 
human brotherhood and Peace, I can contribute first- 
hand impressions of the combat, but in the war-zone of 
labor I am a mere spectator to whom the Trade Unionists 
and the Capitalists appear equal sinners against a true 
human relation. I incline nevertheless to the more optimis- 
tic view of Mr. Buchan, that: — 



WITH AN APOLOGIA FOR NOT BEING PRO-GERMAN 7 1 

"If we can carry that great brotherhood of the trenches 
into the years of peace, and make a cleaner and a better and 
a juster England, where class hatred will abate because class 
selfishness has gone, then, with the grace of God, this war may 
yet rank as one of the happiest events in our history." 

I trust that Mr. Lloyd George, now the risen hope of 
the stern and unbending Tories, will use his new prestige 
with the Dukes to rob hen-roosts with renewed vigor. The 
war has simply stripped the propertied classes of their last 
rag of mendacity — we who are able to pay twelve million 
pounds every two and a half days of war never ceased to 
storm and whine alternately at paying twelve millions every 
365 days for the Old Age Pensions. The new war-pensions 
will increase the benefited circulation of other people's 
money through the countryside. Mr. Hughes * dit son 
fait a VAngleterre when he said: 

"The men of Britain must face the facts. You cannot have 
a great nation when the base is rotten . . . when twelve mil- 
lions of people are on the verge of starvation. . . . What 
must Britain do to be saved? I say she must be born again. 
There can be no peace until we have purged the world of the 
monstrous cancer which is eating out the vitals of civilization." 

But it is a pity that the man from Australia — who would 
have scarcely found a career if he had stayed in England — 
should have added words to this which imply that the 
"cancer" is not poverty as one would imagine, but Ger- 
many, and that the moral of the message should end in the 
bathos of national security: 

"A community which by its very system breeds sexual im- 
morality, which spreads poverty in ever-widening circles, and 
which degrades masses of its population to a level lower than 
1 Speech at Cardiff, March 24, 1916. 



72 SOME PROGNOSTICATIONS AND A PREFACE 

that of the animals, I am quite sure that such a community is 
destined to be wiped out, to die, to be swept out of existence. 
There is no room in Nature for such a community." l 

This is mere rhetoric. There is plenty of room in nature 
for a community which by degrading its masses to the 
level of animals, enriches itself with beasts of burden. The 
greatness of England has long been built upon its docks, 
where it is a convenience to have a surplusage of unskilled 
labor to increase competition and drive down its price. 
The nemesis comes indeed when the number refuses sud- 
denly to rise to a man and a patriot, and your ships are 
left unloaded or undischarged in the greatest crisis of your 
destinies. But with a cornucopia of savings, you may 
muddle through almost anything. No, the question is 
not of the nation's safety but of the reality of its greatness. 
Let us not mix up the re-birth, the re-organization of Eng- 
land, with the question of crushing Germany. A fig for 
"the cancer of German trade" — it is the cancer of English 
poverty that must be cut out. Cutting out the other can- 
cer indeed will only increase your own, as Mr. J. M. Robert- 
son has convincingly shown. 2 This commercial isolation 
of Germany is not even possible. Even at the height of 
the combat England and Russia are compelled to buy from 
Germany — business men tell me — each closing a politic 
eye. It may be well enough to say that such necessities 
of life — or death — must never again be unproduced at 
home but the Rhadamanthine rodomontade of boycotting 
a hundred million customers reminds me of the Talmud — 
saying that ten enemies cannot do a man the harm he can 
do himself. 

Even amid the ghastliness of the war we have been able 

1 Interview by Harold Begbie, Daily Chronicle, March 15, 1916. 

2 Fiscal Policy after the War. 



WITH AN APOLOGIA FOR NOT BEING PRO-GERMAN 73 

to spare a shudder for the strange seafaring story of the 
Dutch lugger that was "picked up derelict with ten men 
on board all mad, who stated that they had killed their 
shipmates and tossed the bodies into the sea because the 
men were possessed of devils." If from one aspect this 
vessel seems an epitome of Europe, if there is no belligerent 
whose record is wholly rational — if at best it is a tale of 
dishonors divided — there is only one way of escaping from 
the horror which comes over men when they realize what 
they have done in their madness — it is by insisting that 
from their very misdeed virtue shall spring. We must see 
to it that out of all this dung a finer civilization shall flower. 
Humanity, caught in this terrible machinery of war, twisted 
and tortured, has yet shown itself full of glorious qualities 
— incredibly brave, beautifully kind, angelically patient, 
heroically devoted, magnificently bountiful. Could all 
these sweet bells be only jangled into the savage discord 
of war — can they not be accorded into the music of a noble 
civilization? This war has proved that there is no height 
or depth of vision but human nature is adequate to make 
it real. It is only because evil is so energetically organized 
against what Wordsworth called "the vacillating incon- 
sistent good" that it is so monotonously — and so properly 
— victorious. If only this inefficiency of the good could 
be exchanged for the efficiency which Germany has dis- 
played for evil. "Debout les mortsV cried the wounded 
French sergeant in one of the greatest stories that have 
come to us from the trenches, as he rallied his dead and 
dying to repulse an assault. We too have long been dead, 
we sons of the cities — deaf to their groanings and blind 
to their tears — but we too can rise at the call and make an- 
other fight for civilization in a renewed War for the 
World. 



74 SOME PROGNOSTICATIONS AND A PREFACE 

XL 

No survey, however cursory, of the spiritual war-zone 
would be complete without a mention of the struggle of 
the Jew to get or preserve his civil rights. This struggle 
is important less for the Jew's sake than the world's sake, 
inasmuch as the position of minorities is the high-water 
mark of civilization. Hence the space given in this book 
to Russia which happens to hold six million Jews or half 
the existing race. Their sufferings in the physical war are 
but adumbrated here, nor, though greater than those of 
any other race except the Armenians would they be men- 
tioned at all in such a period of universal sufferings were 
it not that most of the misery is not the dread necessity of 
war but a literal luxury of woe which Russian Militarismus 
has permitted itself to enjoy. 

Even in England we have a miniature anti-Semitic cam- 
paign, and the ground won by Reason and Love is again 
being sapped by the tireless tides of Unreason and Hate. 
In his history of The Rise and Influence of Rationalism, 
Lecky devoted a chapter of one hundred and thirty pages 
to "The Secularization of Politics," treating it correctly 
as an enhancement and not an impairment of the essential 
principles of Christianity. But for the anti-Semites — after 
Treitschke — all this is to be undone. It is not only in 
Germany that — as Heine told the French — the Middle 
Age fails to lie mouldering (liegt nicht vermodert im Grabe) . 
"Ever and anon it is revived by an evil spirit and comes 
out among us in clear broad daylight and sucks the red 
life from our breast." 

The reactionary movement here as everywhere gathers 
round a Catholic and ultra-nationalist nucleus. It may 
seem odd that when so many Jews are giving high public 
service or sealing their loyalty with their blood that anti- 



WITH AN APOLOGIA FOR NOT BEING PRO-GERMAN 75 

Semitism should be able to persist, but there is always 
enough stupidity, rancor, ignorance, envy and mediaeval 
prejudice surviving to provide a moderate career for a 
limited band of Jew-baiters. So far they are to be con- 
gratulated that the illogic of the armchair has not trans- 
lated itself into the crude criminality of the market-place. 
The organ of the movement styles itself The New Witness. 1 
Its conductors who are understood to be Roman Catholics 
would do better to call it The False Witness and recapitu- 
late its contents in the confessional. 

On the intellectual side the movement is not strong ex- 
cept in names. Mr. G. K. Chesterton has tried to give 
it an intellectual basis by the allegation that the Jew's 
intellect is so disruptive and sceptical. The Jew is even 
capable, he says, of urging that in some other planet two 
and two may perhaps make five. One always understood 
that the crime of the Jew lay precisely in the dogmatism 
of his arithmetic in the realm of theology, but as a 
matter of fact the scepticism in question was most de- 
structively displayed by Mr. Chesterton's own semi- 
sympathizer, Mr. H. G. Wells, in his famous discourse 
on "Scepticism of the Instrument," which now figures as 
an appendix to his Modern Utopia. Not to mention 
Pyrrha. 

A minor fatuity of this school is to refuse the name 
"European" to the Jew, as if the overwhelming bulk of 

1 This organ is supplemented by the Catholic Herald and finds a subtle sup- 
port in the Times which attributes to Jews or Jewish influence every enemy 
manoeuvre, every hostile newspaper, while neglecting to accentuate the 
Jewishness of the numerous pro-English influences. In its issue of March 17, 
1916, for example, we read headlines: "American Capital for Rand Mines," 
"American instead of German Financing," whereas the whole affair both 
in the Rand and in the States appears from the names to be in the hands of 
Jews. Per contra, a column headed "Jewish Finance and Turkey" contains 
nothing but the views of the Berliner Tagcblatt on the fall of Erzeroum! 
(Times, February 25, 1916.) 



76 SOME PROGNOSTICATIONS AND A PREFACE 

the British Empire did not lie outside Europe, or as if all 
its religions had not been made in Asia or Africa. 

I remember Sir Charles Waldstein writing to the Times 
to protest against the Jews being thus classified as non- 
European, but as he himself was born in New York, it 
seemed a somewhat Irish indignation, especially as he 
went on to say that the Jews had co-operated with the 
Greeks to build up the European mind. For if so, then the 
European mind is semi-Asiatic. 

The British Empire, the greatest motley of creeds, races 
and colors, that has ever been brought under one standard 
of justice — a phenomenon in itself, as majestic as the Papal 
blessing urbi et orbi — lives by the harmonization of its 
measureless diversity, and the attempt of a little Catholic 
clique — till lately itself under oppression — to monopolize 
British patriotism and represent itself as the sole true- 
born-Englishmanry could only be dealt with adequately 
by the flail of a Defoe. This clique understands neither 
Christianity, which it crucifies, nor the British Empire, 
which it caricatures. 

In so far as its members have any real religion, they are 
pre-Pauline Jews; too narrow even in their nationalism to 
remember the Mosaic Commandment that there is one 
law for the homeborn and the stranger. But the pre- 
Pauline Jews possessed only a toy kingdom, and that mostly 
under alien suzerainty; they did not straggle over a fifth 
of the globe, and set up pleasure or trading quarters in 
the other four-fifths. For members of this all-conquering 
people to resent the immigration of a race devoid of even 
a single square inch of national soil is an insolence describ- 
able only as vfipis and challenging like it a divine nemesis. 

So far goes the arrogance of this little group that it still 
boasts of its "hospitality" even to British-born Jews. 
And even other Englishmen, free from anti-Semitism, are 



WITH AN APOLOGIA FOR NOT BEING PRO-GERMAN 77 

still so caddishly conscious of their legislative magnanimity 
that they appear to expect the enfranchised Jew to endorse 
every passing mood of the majority, and to go about — 
to the third and fourth generation— exuding gratitude, 
like a Uriah Heep. 

" With bated breath and whispering humbleness." 

That were indeed to have sold one's birthright for a mess 
of pottage. The Jew cannot surrender even his right to 
criticise Christianity — indeed to criticise it is the sole 
raison d'etre of his separateness. And he is not less quali- 
fied for criticising it — as the Christian curiously imagines — 
but. more qualified by the fact of his racial affinity with 
its group of founders. For my own part I hold that the 
highest patriotic service a writer can render to the country 
of his birth is to offer it his truest thinking and his deepest 
race-heritage, and to try to make it worthier of his love. 
I take my definition of patriotism not from those who 
illustrate Dr. Johnson's 1 but from those who say with 
Jaures: "La vraie formule du patriotisme, c'est le droit 
egal de toutes les patries a la liberte et a la justice, c'est 
le devoir pour tout citoyen d'accroitre en sa patrie les 
forces de liberte et de justice." 

Accusations of anti-Britishism would leave my withers 
less unwrung, did I not observe that Cabinet Ministers, 
models of propriety, patriotism and all-British ideals, fare 

1 "At Portsmouth Police Court on Saturday Herbert Cole, described as 
an author and publisher, was charged under the Vagrancy Act with attempt- 
ing to procure charitable contributions by fraud. . . . 

"The evidence was that the prisoner started what he described as 'The 
Patriots' League,' with himself as secretary. During 1915 prisoner had 
paid £628 into his bank account. . . . 

"The prisoner was sentenced to three months' imprisonment and ordered 
to pay £25 towards the costs of the prosecution." (Times, December 6. 
1915O 



78 SOME PROGNOSTICATIONS AND A PREFACE 

no better at the hands of the anti-Semites than my un- 
chastened Semitic self. 



XLI 

One word more and I have begun. Some years ago 
"Max" published a caricature of our men of letters, all 
engaged in tub-thumping instead presumably of cultivating 
literature proper in reclusive Italian villas. The notion 
that literature is a hothouse flower seems to belong entirely 
to our own generation and our own island, and was perhaps 
fostered by the fact that the two greatest poets of the 
Victorian era had the air of being unable to write in prose. 
On the Continent literature has never been divorced from 
politics. Nor was it in the virile ages of English literature. 
Defoe's passion for liberty led him to gaol and the pillory; 
Swift's pamphlet On the Conduct of the Allies produced 
the Peace of Utrecht (the preliminaries of which were more- 
over negotiated by the poet, Prior). It was to silence 
Fielding's pasquinades that Walpole instituted our dramatic 
censorship. But why multiply instances when the greatest 
academic artist in English literature — Milton — was also 
the most passionate champion of English liberty, some of 
whose books were publicly burnt by the hangman? 



THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 
THE WAR DEVIL 

(From the Daily Chronicle, April 21, 1913) 

" First Moloch, horrid thing, besmear'd with blood 
Of human sacrifice, and parents' tears, 
Though for the noise of drums and timbrels loud 
Their children's cries unheard, that passed through fire 
To his grim idol." — Paradise Lost, Book I. 



Mr. Winston Churchill has more than once, in phrases 
stamped with genius, expressed his sense of the folly and 
futility of the armaments which he is doomed to organize 
and amplify — against a practically equal counter- weight on 
the opposition side. 1 Nor is the other side backward in 
handsome acknowledgments of futility and folly. And yet, 
as in a ghastly trance, conscious of everything, but unable to 
stir hand or foot, the peoples of Europe see themselves 
slowly crushed under masses of iron and steel, annually 
growing more monstrous and gigantic. When the twentieth 
century opened, England's naval expenditure was some 30 

1 "Une maladie nouvelle s'est repandue en Europe; elle a saisi nos princes, 
et leur fait entretenir un nombre desordonne de troupes. Elle a ses re- 
doublements, et elle devient necessairement contagieuse; car, sit6t qu'un 
Etat augraente ce qu'il appelle ses troupes, les autres soudain augmentent les 
leurs: de facon qu'on ne gagne rien par la que la ruine commune. Chaque 
monarque tient sur pied toutes les armees qu'il pourroit avoir si ses peuples 
6toient en danger d'etre extermines; et on nomme paix cet etat d'effort de 
tous contre tous." (Montesquieu, De L 'Esprit des Lois, Book xiii, cap. 17.) 

79 



80 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

millions; it is now approaching 50 millions. Our education 
budget is just about one-fourth of our fighting budget. 
Civilization, like Laocoon, is strangling in the coils of ser- 
pents, but of serpents it has itself hatched from the precious 
eggs of pedigree cockatrices. Hitherto, these serpents, as 
in the Trojan legend, were two — a land-serpent and a sea- 
serpent. But we have now generated an air-serpent, fiercer 
than the fabled gryphon, direr than the chimaera whose 
breath was fire. And while Laocoon strove to throttle his 
serpents, we are fatally compelled to fatten ours, to 
strengthen the sinister muscles that enfold us, to inject 
into the fangs the venom that beslavers us. Once a year, 
in a desperate effort to disentwine himself, Mr. Churchill 
offers a truce, some reduction of armaments, a Sabbatical 
year. But it is a forlorn hope. Germany can no more 
disentangle herself than England. The workmen are en- 
gaged, the dockyards must be fed. Nations are made 
for navies, not navies for nations. Would you throw out 
of gear the great industry of Death — that staple of Life! 
Even as he waves the white flag, Mr. Churchill is con- 
strained to cry, in the spirit of another fool of Fate: 

" Build on— no bluff! 
And damn'd be he who first cries, 'Hold, enough!' " 

Were our drama alive, this mysterious modern Fate, im- 
palpable and ineluctable, against whose invisible mesh our 
up-to-date Winston feels himself vainly beating, would have 
replaced the unreal movement of destiny in the Greek 
tragedies or the obsolete supernatural machinery of the 
Shakespearean theatre. Imaginatively incarnated, this 
subtly-pervasive Necessity would appear as a sort of War 
Devil, chuckling with grim humor as he watches the writh- 
ings of his minions and marionettes — statesmen primed 
with culture and Christianity, their lips chanting the praises 



THE WAR DEVIL 8 1 

of peace, yet condemned by their mocking master to add 
brick after brick to the Temple of Apollyon, and to build 
not God's Kingdom on Earth but the Devil's. 

II 

Blessed are the peacemakers runs the War Devil's 
Beatitude. But even his minions and marionettes must 
observe that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to 
the strong. Size is not safety. The nation whose 9,000 
sea-dogs, aided by the elements, scattered the 28,000 Span- 
iards of the Armada, should least of all put its faith in 
automatic arithmetic. One would imagine that Germany 
and England could play the war-game like cards, that Mr. 
Churchill could deal a destroyer and be trumped by a 
Zeppelin, that Admiral von Tirpitz could lay down a 20-knot 
cruiser to be taken by a 30-knot cruiser, or that England 
has only to show a sufficient hand of Super-Dreadnoughts 
for Germany to cry, "I pass!" One Nelson may equal a 
dozen Dreadnoughts. Yet I am not aware that the neces- 
sity of Nelsons, or of the brain-power standard, exercises 
either the Admiralty or the music-halls. That poor little 
schoolboy who killed himself the other day because he was 
refused admission to the Navy on the ground he was short- 
sighted in one eye — how he reminds us that the Nelson of 
the Nile and Trafalgar had only one eye altogether ! Never, 
said the principal of his college, had he given a boy "such a 
consummately admirable character!" Possibly an embryo 
Nelson — yet lost to the nation on the same automatic sys- 
tem. And where in this ever-evolving programme to stop? 
In a century we shall have at this rate some 500 warships — 
the majority, I suppose, Hyper-Ultra-Trans-Super-Dread- 
noughts. Who is to man them? Will Englishmen be all at 
sea, reverted to a race of searovers, like their Danish fore- 



82 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

fathers? But more possibly water-ships will be as obsolete 
as stagecoaches. Armageddon will be in the air (where, 
indeed, it has been since my childhood). 

Ill 

In this nightmare of civilization, two comforting theories 
have found eager ears. M. Bloch taught that war is now 
impossible, since it can only result in stalemate. Mr. 
Norman Angell teaches that war is economically unsound, 
that it cannot pay. But it would now seem that it is peace 
which is impossible, that it is peace which does not pay. 
Mr. Winston Churchill has just told us there is no finality 
even in Super-Dreadnoughts, that each invention has 
barely the duration of a Lord Mayor, that every year the 
perfections of last year must be scrapped, that there is not 
an item of equipment but has to be constantly revised, 
be it dockyard machinery or telegraphic apparatus, be 
it searchlights or torpedo-tubes, range-finders or gyro- 
compasses, or this new plague of air-ships. For the Devil 
is a good paymaster and the cunningest brains of the globe 
are at work in his smithies and laboratories ever destroying 
the instruments of destruction by bettering them. Mr. 
Churchill did not mention the cost of casualties, or cite 
the chapter of accidents. Let some Member of Parliament 
extract statistics of the damages of the last decade — the 
lights that failed, the engines that exploded, the destroyers 
that destroyed themselves, the cruisers that collided, the 
air-ships that foundered, the balloons that burst. So far 
from feeling that safety lies in numbers, I have horrid visions 
of congested ships, under real war, jamming and ramming, 
the more the mazier. 1 Add the cost of the dress-rehearsals 

1 This has of course happened as the recent collision between the Laverock 
and the Medusa reminds us. Four or five smaller vessels have been lost 



THE WAR DEVIL 83 

of war, not merely the pageants and demonstrations, but 
the everyday practice. Every gun that goes off blows into 
smithereens the upkeep of a family. What we call Peace is 
thus really a sort of Pankhurst-war, writ large, in which 
property is destroyed on a colossal scale, if not life. Were 
we therefore to follow the economic argument, I am not sure 
it would not lead us to wipe out the German navy at once, 
while it is still vincible, rather than face the annual de- 
struction of scores of millions of money which Germany 
imposes upon us. Which conclusion being clearly a sug- 
gestion of the War Devil, it ensues that the Angel of Peace 
is not Norman. And verily the Angel of Peace is Hebrew, 
and Hebrew only. It is Isaiah with his great vision of a 
brotherhood of toilers, it is Jesus with His quite scientific 
doctrine that whoso takes the sword shall perish by it. 
" And they shall beat their swords into ploughshares." This 
is the only scrapping that will be effective in the end — 
not of sword into super-sword, Dreadnought into Super- 
Dreadnought. 

IV 

The War Devil has yet another device. For the price of 
Peace is paid not only in hard cash but in honor. The fear 
of the Lord is the beginning of Wisdom, but the fear of the 
War Devil is the beginning of Madness. Worse than war 

in this way; three or more have inexcusably blown up in harbor, and a 
number have foundered or stranded. But on the whole the Navy has done 
marvellously, and, in any case, the point of this article was not to demand a 
reduction of the Navy, but to point out that no rate of increase could be a 
safeguard against war. Coincidently with the publication of this article came 
the revelation of the moneys spent by the great German gun and armor 
manufacturers on "patriotism" and now that more than a hundred millions 
a week are being spent by the world on warfare, a colossal automatic mech- 
anism has been set at work to impede the coming of Peace. All news- 
papers that talk of a "patched-up peace" should be strictly scrutinized; 
subsidization is always as possible as sincerity. 



84 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

is the death of the soul of a people. For if there is a peace 
of God which passeth all understanding, there is a peace 
of the Devil which passeth all endurance. It is a peace 
purchased by sacrificing to security every high national 
ideal, every generous instinct. Such a peace we enjoy to- 
day. The baleful shadow of Bismarck looms like a Brocken- 
spectre over Europe, and in her terror England has thrown 
herself into the arms of Russia, sinking perforce to the level 
of her barbarian swain. And the more massive her arma- 
ments, the more mouse-like her action, the larger her 
Dreadnoughts, the greater her dread. We have all the cost 
of greatness, only no greatness. And the same spiritual 
blight has spread over the bulk of Europe. Hampered by 
their coats of mail, the nations can scarcely move a ringer. 
The Balkan States rush in where the Great Powers fear to 
tread, and, when at last United Europe nerves itself to 
demonstrate, it is against — Montenegro ! Here is the War 
Devil's opportunity to whisper, is Peace worth the price? 
What profits it to guard the husk of a people? It is in such 
moments that Christendom pants for Crusades, that Islam 
proclaims Jehads. Only by remembering there is no "Holy " 
War can we be on our guard against the War Devil in this, 
his subtlest mood. For who believes to-day that history's 
Holy Wars were indeed holy? The most righteous war 
may only end in blood-lust and earth-hunger, as the latest 
war of Cross versus Crescent is ending. No, let us turn a 
deaf ear to the Devil, though he speak with the tongue of 
angels. Though blood and iron paralyze and demoralize 
Europe, let us rind some other remedy than iron and blood. 

V 

The favorite alternative to Armaments is Arbitration. 
But, even at The Hague, let us beware lest the War Devil 



THE WAR DEVIL 85 

be not lulling and gulling us. Since the Hague Conference 
was established, some of the bloodiest wars in history have 
been fought. Outbuilt at sea, Germany takes to the air. 
France calls on her citizens for Napoleonic sacrifices. Nay, 
British Colonies, long as languorous abodes of Peace as 
Thomson's "Castle of Indolence," are now singing his 
Rule, Britannia in rag-time; they have embraced con- 
scription, and are building battleships. Pleasant as it is 
to recall the successes of The Hague, the ubiquitous Peace 
bodies, the Peace agreements and Peace conventions, the 
Peace congresses and the Peace celebrations, and the 
hundred and three economists now preparing erudite 
international essays out of the interest on Mr. Carnegie's 
two millions, let us not forget that four armament firms in 
Britain alone have a capital of twenty-three millions, on 
which interest must be earned. And over the thin and 
intermittent pipings of peace crash the imperturbable 
hammers of the War Devil, fashioning his ships; the great 
furnaces roar, forging his cannons, the war-drum beats, 
the trumpet blares, the kings go to their thrones to the 
sound of tramping soldiers, the great captains of industry, 
the chiefs of art and learning, thrust into the background, 
hidden away like poor relations. So long as the War Devil 
dictates the very symbols of our civilization, he will re- 
main its master. So long as our conceptions remain radi- 
cally unchanged, so long as no new world-religion flames into 
being with a new passionate sense of brotherhood and a 
new scale of human values, so long we shall cry, Peace, 
Peace, where there is no Peace. Arbitration may be a 
palliative, the thought that the profit of war is "a great 
illusion" may give men pause, but neither of these concep- 
tions goes to the root of the matter, and wherever men 
feel greatly or desire greatly, they will accept no arbitra- 
ment but the sword's. And it is Nationality, not gold, 



86 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

that is the prize of war — the enhanced common conscious- 
ness of a group, with all its rich-dyed contributions to the 
web of human existence — and if Nationality is not worth 
the cost, or can be secured by more civilized frictions, or 
springs sufficiently from heredity and environment, let 
Nationality or its dependence on war be denounced as 
"the great illusion" — not the estimate of war's profits, 
which is not war's mainspring. 

VI 

If the Peace-prophets cannot bring the Millennium, it 
is because they are usually purblind. Hence the laughter 
of the ungodly. Hell is paved with the solutions of the 
myopic. The true seer must first of all see. An analysis 
of Arbitration shows that it leaves the facts of life out. 
It deals with the past. Life presses to the future. Life is 
unstable equilibrium. There is no reason on earth why 
England should, and Germany should not, enjoy the 
hegemony of the world — except that so it is. But there is 
equally no reason why it should remain so. By labor and 
sacrifice, by luck or cunning, it is always open to Germany 
to push England from her pride of place. And everywhere 
in the New World new nations are being born, old breeds 
mingling, fresh life-forces surging. But Arbitration sup- 
poses a closed world, a fixed world, the life-flood frozen 
suddenly when the first Hague Conference was founded. 
Its experts are engaged with musty documents, with faded 
maps, with forgotten records. Most of its problems are 
actually connected with boundaries. If Arbitration of 
this sort is to replace war, then the map of the world must 
remain eternally as it happened to be at the moment 
Arbitration was invented. But endless ancient enmities 
seethe, endless aspirations and earth-hungers demand 



THE WAR DEVIL 87 

satisfaction, and if the world is not to be re-carved by the 
sword it must be readjusted by reason and love. The 
learned lawyers cannot help us. Their arbitrations take 
us no further. Their precedents becloud the issue. The 
love of Law must yield to the law of love. If Germany 
desires of our territory, she must have it. There is no 
reason other than the sword why Britain should possess 
nearly a fourth of the globe. No law of Sinai or Calvary 
laid it down that Australia or Egypt should be British. 
An all-red route means a route of blood. In her turn, Ger- 
many must give up Alsace and Lorraine, establish ''the 
open door" in all her possessions. And so all round— over 
the whole field of politics. Those who cannot endure the 
notion of freely surrendering territory or tariffs at the 
bidding of reason and love must cease to prate of Peace. 
Between love and the sword there is no true third way. 
Sir Harry Johnston has recently published a precious little 
volume, indicating from his rich concrete experience of 
men and cities, of civilizations and savageries, many his- 
toric grievances which the Powers could set right as simply 
as they could have removed the Balkan grievances without 
the Balkan bloodshed. Such a book is a primer of true 
Arbitration, a first aid to statesmen. Without such an 
inner spirit the Palace of Peace is a white-washed sepulchre. 
The War-Devil can only be conquered by the God of Love. 



LAMENT 

(Published in 191 2 in the First Number of The Daily News and Leader) 

["The arguments of Sir Edward Grey and the supporters of his 
policy, when stripped of the specious garnishings with which they 
were originally decked, but the tattered and tawdry remnants of 
which few now ever pretend to cherish, are based on the following 
assumptions, all of which are open to grave objections: 

" (1) That moral right and abstract justice have no place in Foreign 
Policy, which is and must be based solely on considerations of ex- 
pediency. 

" (2) That the support of Russia (it is absurd to talk of 'friendship' 
in this connection) was necessary to this country to maintain the 
'Balance of Power' and to check the alleged aspirations of Germany 
to the hegemony of Europe. 

"(3) That Russia's support* could be bought and retained by the 
sacrifice of Persia, and that therefore Persia should be made a sacrifice 
to that end." — The Persian Oil Concession, by Professor E. S. 
Browne.] 

They blind the linnet and it sings 

More ripplingly its inner glee, 
Giving the soul a sense of wings — 

I cannot sing because I see. 

Time was my voice as lightsome rang — 
In childish darkness lapped secure, 

Self-shut in innocence I sang, 
The world was pure as I was pure. 

A world whose seas yearned to its skies, 

That made a music as it span, 
Quiring in holy harmonies 

The growing godliness of man. 



LAMENT 

A world whose head was England, crowned 
With freedom, chivalry and love, 

The bondsman of the wronged and bound, 
The ark to every fainting dove. 

And now my England I behold 

A Sancho Panza Land, supreme 
In naught save land and ships and gold 

Security her highest dream. 

Let Finland fall, let Persia end, 

So Russia help her still to be, 
She in her turn will aid her friend 

To bloodier autocracy. 

That spheral music childhood caught 
Is mute, and for that angel-speech 

I hear the jungle-gospel taught 
In tiger-roar and parrot-screech. 

For man, that wilder beast of brain, 
Whose jaws spit fire, whose claws are swords 

Bellows the brute's old creed again — 
Earth's fiercest are her lawful lords. 

And through the grassy flowered crust 
That veils her burning ball, I mark 

The inner hell of greed and lust, 
The smouldering forces of the dark. 

I see the sun-lands where the flow 
Of black men's blood is harvest-rain; 

Congo, San Thome, Mexico, 
And many a secret place of pain. 

And worse! the white slaves shipped by guile, 
The women-freights that tawdry-bright 

Walk alien streets with tragic smile 
And mar the majesty of night. 



89 



go THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

I see what drives the wheels of State, 

How nations hide their blood-stained loot, 

Greatness that comes by murder's gate, 
And glory by the all-red route. 

Give back my days of faith and flame, 
The magic mists of life at spring, 

Blind me to Earth's and England's shame, 
Put out my eyes and let me sing. 



PARADISE LOST 

(From King Albert's Book) 

"Do you know what I marvel at most in the world? It is the 
powerlessness of material force. Sooner or later the world is con- 
quered by the idea." 

Occasionally for me the fog in the North Sea lifts, and 
through the letters of a young officer on a battleship I get 
a glimpse of how Britannia is ruling the waves. The pre- 
cise position of her trident remains scrupulously shrouded — 
at first even the name was removed from the ship's letter- 
paper — but the glimpse is enough to reveal the greatness 
and madness of mankind. It is life at its acme of strain 
and exaltation: life joyously ready to pass on the instant 
into death, as some unseen mine is struck, or some crafty 
torpedo strikes. Everybody sleeps in his clothes, and half 
the night not at all. The great ship is bared of all save 
necessities: my young friend's spare wardrobe, with all 
his miscellany of superfluous possessions, the queer garnered 
treasure of the years, comes economically home. Why, 
indeed, sink more capital with the ship than is absolutely 
inevitable? 

Now and again the tension of this terrible vigilance is 
relieved, if only by a change in tension. One seeks death 
instead of waiting for it. There is a grapple with a German 
cruiser, and those not at the guns crowd cheerfully on 
deck to watch the match with that wonderful British love 
of sport. They compare the cannonading, note with lively 
interest the scores made by the rival shells. Once the rift 

91 



92 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

in the fog shows the return of a raiding flotilla, scarred 
with glorious battle, and the other vessels of the fleet are 
dressed to salute its triumph, the bands are playing Rule, 
Britannia, the crews are cheering and singing. 

But none of these peeps has left on me so ineffaceable an 
impression as the picture of my young friend reading — 
reading at every break in his grim watches — and reading 
not the detective stories that unbent Bismarck but — 
Paradise Lost! For the first time he has had leisure 
to read that sonorous epic straight through and, unlike 
Dr. Johnson who questioned if anyone ever wished it 
longer, he revels insatiably in the Miltonic splendors, and 
he quotes Addison and the Spectator in endorsement of his 
enthusiasm. Despite the Admiralty decree, you see, he 
has been unable to regard his books as dispensable: they 
must sink or float with him. And so in the midst of this 
waste of white waters and hissing shrapnel, he has found 
for himself a quiet Paradise of beautiful words and visionary 
magnificence, and it exists for him out of relation to the 
tense and tragic actual. And yet what could be apter 
reading than this epic. 

" Of man's first disobedience and the fruit 
Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste 
Brought death into the world and all our woe? " 

The very first incident, indeed, recorded after Paradise 
was lost is a murder, and this fratricidal strife of Cain and 
Abel has repeated itself in every generation and given to 
the phrase " the brotherhood of man" a sinister significance. 
But never in all the long history of blood-lust have so many 
millions of brothers stood embattled, ready to spike one 
another's bowels with steel, or shatter their faces with 
devilish explosives, as in this twentieth century of the 
Christian era. 



PARADISE LOST 



93 



Now, whatever be the rights or wrongs of war, one thing 
seems clear. The weapons are wrong. My young friend, 
with his fme-spun brain and his spiritual delight in Milton's 
harmonics, ought not to be annihilated by a piece of raw 
matter. One does not fight a Sevres vase with a stone. 
Bring up your Chinese vase an you will, and let the battle 
be of beauty. There is a horrible expression, "food for 
powder" — you will find it in all languages that are really 
civilized. It implies that the masses are so coarse in tex- 
ture, are carcasses so gross and sub-human, that their 
best use is to be thrown to the guns — a providential fire- 
screen for the finer classes. Democracy will in due time 
take note of this conception. But in its rude way the 
phrase shadows forth a truth — the truth that, for all who 
have passed beyond the animal stage, the war of tooth and 
claw is antiquated. Our war, if war there be, must be 
conducted with weapons suitable to the dignity of the 
super-beast who has been so laboriously evolved, suitable 
to the spirit which through innumerable aeons has been 
winning its way through the welter of brute impulses. Not 
for man the slaver of the serpent, the fangs of the tiger. 
And shelling is only the ejection of a deadlier slaver, the 
bayonet only a fiercer fang. It seems futile to have evolved 
from the brute if our brain-power only makes us bigger 
brutes. "The man behind the gun" — a 15-inch gun that 
hurls a ton of metal for twelve miles — is a wilder and more 
monstrous beast than ever appeared even in the ante- 
diluvian epoch, and that he should not be kept safely stuffed 
in a museum like the pterodactyl is an intolerable anach- 
ronism. A world in which with one movement of his 
paw he can kill off a whole congregation of Milton-wor- 
shippers is a world which should have been nipped in the 
nebula. No, if fighting there must be, let my young friend 
fight against Nietzsche-worshippers — -let the lucid lines 



94 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

of the Puritan poet confound the formless squadrons of 
the Pagan dithyrambist. Brain against brain, soul against 
soul, thought against thought, art against art, man, in 
short, against man — there lies the fight of the future. If 
my young friend were a man of science, he would be kept 
awake not by the German torpedoes but by the German 
treatises: were he only a tailor, he should never throw 
away his yard-stick for a lance but with his good old scissors 
cut out the Teutonic tailor. 

After such civilized fashion, indeed, the Anglo-German 
contest has long been raging, and the German has been 
winning all along the line. His patience, his industry, his 
nice study of his customers, has everywhere swept the 
Englishman aside. Before his music the Briton fell — in 
worship; his drama invaded us triumphantly. Why was 
Germany not content with this victorious campaign, with 
this campaign worthy of human beings? German in- 
fluence, German Kultur — it is spread by peace, not by the 
sword. To German Universities shoals of Russian students 
flocked as to shrines, humble feudatories of German scholar- 
ship, German thoroughness. To the barbarous regions, 
where an Ovid might still lament his exile, they carried 
back German methods, the cult of German science. And 
to me, on my illiterate island, little German cities, a Munich, 
a Dresden, where the theatre was classic and inexpensive, 
and the opera a form of art and not a social display, loomed 
like models of civilization. Why must Germany challenge 
the world on the lower plane of brute matter? It is only 
the inferior peoples that need the sword. The Turks have 
had to rule with a rod of iron — they had no right but might, 
no gift for the world. Such races must assert themselves 
in fire and write their edicts in blood. But fire burns down 
and blood dries up and fades, and the only durable in- 
fluence is the power of the spirit. 



PARADISE LOST 95 

Fatal perversity of Germany — to have misunderstood 
her own greatness! Proud in her pseudo-philosophy, she 
has repeated "man's first disobedience" — she has ignored 
the divine voice, she has listened to the lower promptings 
of the serpent. There will never be a Paradise again for 
man till he bends his ear to a truer philosopher than 
Treitschke, to a prince of peace: 

" Till one greater man 
Restore us and regain the blissful seat." 



THE SHADOWS OF SOCIETY 

" As rags are but the shadows of our riches 
And prostitutes the shadows of our lust, 

And glooming slums are cast by shining mansions, 
And round our churches lies a dark distrust. 

So in this War where love and pity cease 

Behold the obverse image of our Peace." 



96 



THE NEXT WAR 

"As I reflected upon the intensive application of man to war in 
cold, rain, and mud; in rivers, canals, and lakes; underground, in the 
air, and under the sea; infected with vermin, covered with scabs, 
adding the stench of his own filthy body to that of his decomposing 
comrades; hairy, begrimed, bedraggled, yet with unflagging zeal 
striving eagerly to kill his fellows; and as I felt within myself the 
mystical urge of the sound of great cannon, I realized that war is a 
normal state of man." — Dr. George W. Crile: A Mechanistic View 
of War and Peace. 

A hundred years ago the Congress of Vienna met with 
dancing and revelry to put the peace of Europe on a per- 
manent foundation. Even the Jews, represented by dep- 
uties, looked forward — as the reward of their fratricidal 
strife in every camp — to equal rights everywhere. 

While the pundits and diplomatists were still talking, 
Napoleon escaped from Elba, but after the little hitch of 
Waterloo, the Eight Powers proceeded with the partition 
of their world, and the Czar of Russia, the Emperor of Aus- 
tria and the King of Prussia, entered into a Holy Alliance 
so that the Peace of Europe and the principles of Chris- 
tianity should be henceforth unbroken. 

At more than one peace-gathering in London, informed 
by even more than the Viennese enthusiasm for humanity, 
it has been my ungrateful role to try to bring home to my 
fellow-members the magnitude of our task, the pettiness of 
our equipment and the insufficiency of our sacrifices. 

But there is nothing more blinding than the white light 
of an ideal. On one of these occasions the late Mr. Stead 
rebuked me hotly for my "unbelief "; he had just made a 

97 



98 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

tour of the crowned heads of Europe and they were princes 
of peace, one and all — war was practically ruled out. 
Another time it was the chairman, Lord Shaw, who was 
stung into reproof, the shrewd Scotch Lord of Appeal 
rhapsodizing like a Shelley. 

But the most recent and vivid of my recollections — it is 
scarcely older than the war — is of seeing Sir Edward Grey 
and Mr. Carnegie side by side at a public peace-dinner, 
the fine upstanding English squire and the shrivelled 
Scotch-American ironmaster, each buoying up the other's 
dreams and the little octogenarian declaring with shining 
eyes that he, Carnegie, would yet live to see the end of war. 1 

The Congress of Vienna had at least the fall of Napoleon 
for an asset of hope. But in 19 14 the very outbreak of 
war was the signal for the outbreak of optimism. The 
War That Will End War was the title of a precipitate 
pamphlet by Mr. Wells and his hail to the coming Peace 
on Earth found a hundred echoes. But it is characteristic 
of Utopians that in the very bankruptcy of their visions 
they find a fresh ground of hope, since a crash is at least 
a change, and as yet stagnation has been the limit of 
their achievement. The roughest examination of the facts 
reveals, however, that the seeds of war are scattered over 
the planet as profusely as the seeds of life, and as it needs 
only the fructification of a single seed to engender war, 
the notion that we can escape war by some process other 
than the eradication of these seeds from human nature, 
by some diplomatic dexterity, International Tribunal, or 
financial demonstration, is a pathetic illusion. 

1 The exact date was June 14, 19 14, eleven days before Austria declared 
war. On my menu I find pencilled by Mr. Carnegie the name of "Count 
Karuebuck" of the Palace of Peace at The Hague to whom he referred me 
in a certain pacifist matter. A German paper reminds me that Mr. Carnegie 
presented a tribute to the Kaiser as an expression of the admiration of peace- 
lovers all the world over. 



THE NEXT WAR 99 

Most of the germs of war lie indeed in the spheres of 
consciousness below Reason, and to eliminate them needs 
a transformation of our deepest being. Men need not 
become supermen, but they must complete their evolution 
from the brute. The widely diffused ardor for world-peace 
is a welcome sign that this evolution is still in process, but 
this moral ardor is not accompanied by any adequate 
intellectual grasp of realities, nor is it even moral enough 
to be willing to pay the price of peace; no, not even though 
we have now learnt the price of war — the colossal, stagger- 
ing, sickening price of modern war. 

Until the conquering nations are ready to pool their 
winnings and divide them among the losers, it is idle to 
expect the Millennium. Let us rather analyze the causes 
of war so that in the "war against war" we may know 
what we are up against, and where to apply our counter 
pressure. 

The first cause of war is the combative and sporting 
element in man, relic of his primeval barbarism. The 
higher ape we call Homo is the bravest and fiercest of the 
beasts. But he is angel as well as beast, and the fighting 
instinct is imblent with his noblest of impulses of love and 
self-sacrifice. He alone is capable of fighting for a vision. 

It is this heroic side of war which the Utopians ignore. 
The military manual instructs you to twist your bayonet 
in the enemy's bowels, since mere transfixing may not be 
fatal. What can be more revolting? Yet, to overlook that 
the twister is offering his own entrails to the steel — to 
dismiss him as a mere murderous brute — what can be more 
unjust? Tennyson tells us that it is not so difficult to 
overthrow a He, but that 

" A lie which is part a truth is a harder matter to fight." 
War is a lie which is half a truth, and hence its invinci- 



IOO THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

bility. And it is this truthful half which supplies a sound 
basis for all the poetry and romance of war, though these 
in their turn hide away the other half — the dirt and disease, 
the dullness and ghastliness, and the fact that the warrior 
is butcher as well as martyr. 

At the front or in the hospitals, the verminous, gangre- 
nous aspects of "the sport of kings" cannot indeed be 
obscured, but these ugly realities are the secret of a small 
minority; their descriptions are often euphemistic, and 
even when realistic are not realized by the vast majority 
of the nation, dominated as these are by the romantic 
vision of war, and, after a time, under the hypnotic obses- 
sion of the dominant romanticism and the transitoriness of 
physical impressions, the horrors fade even from the minds 
of the witnesses. The wounded who recover are pleased, 
and dead men tell no tales. 

As over the torn and blackened fields of blood the green 
grass comes back to cover and purify, so poetry gathers 
over the ghastliest realities, illumining them with the old 
glamor. Mothers who have lost their sons cannot afford 
not to feel their death was necessary and sublime. The 
vested interests of love and grief are solid for war. The 
great national storehouse of war-lyrics and battle-pictures 
finds itself enriched by new treasures, beauty blossoming 
like roses under the manure of carnage, and the next genera- 
tion is born into an even more compelling atmosphere of 
combat. 

War breeds war as money begets money. Its infection 
is with us from the nursery. It is significant that Mr. Wells, 
himself, has not only found his chief literary inspiration 
in war, but has actually placed on the market a new war- 
game. After Armageddon, fought as it has been on land 
and sea, in air and under water, the novel combinations 
of adventure will engender a series of books for boys which 



THE NEXT WAR IOI 

will enthrall the young generation and bind it fast to the 
war chariot. 1 

Moreover, just as War is a lie which is half a truth, so 
Peace may be a truth which is half a lie. To quote Tenny- 
son again: 

"Peace in her vineyard — yes! — but a company forges the wine." 

When Peace in her turn becomes the breeding ground 
of sordidness, when life sinks to the cult of comfort and 
the dollar, then the spirit of man turns with tragic impa- 
tience to the other half-truth and the same poet to whom 
we owe the exquisite picture of an earth robed in universal 
harvest, 

"Universal ocean softly washing all her warless isles," 

is found calling for 

"The blood-red blossom of War with a heart of fire." 

The second cause of war is the existence of the Army 
and Navy, with all their historic tradition, their ritual 
and pageantry, their atmosphere of music and bravery, 
and the subconscious desire which they beget in their mem- 
bers for professional experience, and in the nation at large 
for utilization of these vast assets. Who can believe that 
any nation is ripe for the disbandment of historic regiments, 
the scrapping of warships? War in fact has had a fillip 
by the invention of airships and submarines, for curiosity 

1 Of course some of these books will ostensibly be written for adults, and 
for these childish minds this war will be a storehouse for ages. Villains can 
be killed by Zeppelins, or torpedoed on the high seas, intrigues can be covered 
by alleged internments, ladies' limbs can be blown into festive lunch-tables, 
as occurred in Paris. Thrills in short, ad infinitum. The cinematograph 
will of course seize on all that is appealing and eliminate all that is revolting. 
Did our Press Bureau supply unselected film-pictures of war, the next 
generation would no more want a war than an earthquake. 



102 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

as to the practical working of all our novel engines of war 
is added to the itch for action. 

The third cause of war is Nationality, with its struggle 
first for breathing space and then for places in the sun, 
and its semi-false conceptions of national glory. The price 
of Nationality is War, and so long as Nationality is believed 
to be worth the price, War there will be. The boundaries 
of nations are drawn in blood. They stand by their mili- 
tary strength or their strategic alliance with military 
strength. To relieve them from the pressure of enemies 
would be to sap the nerve of Nationality. 

There are those who urge that everything is at bottom 
economic. But if I have not given the economic factors 
the first place, a high place they must surely have. 

The vested interests of war are gigantic. An expert, 
addressing the Royal Statistical Society of London, calcu- 
lated that the total cost of the first year of this war would 
be nearly ten thousand million pounds. Even in peace the 
trade of death is the livelihood of millions, and any attempt 
to cut down armaments will be resisted insidiously or openly 
by forces imponderable but almost invincible. And besides 
the interests already vested there are the interests sought — 
the trade monopolies and markets, the exploitation of mines 
and oil wells and food-supply areas. 

Dynastic and holy wars are diminishing but far from 
extinct, and the clergy by never failing to bless the war 
banners keep up the notion that every war is holy. Color 
and race still maintain that dislike for the unlike, which 
is a fruitful source of strife. 

The modern grouping of Alliances and Powers make 
for war by increasing the war risks of every member. The 
new importance of time and the attack in modern strategics 
gives no breathing space for delay. Negotiations are con- 
ducted at a fever-heat not conducive to pacific settlement. 



THE NEXT WAR 103 

Autocracy makes for war through the temptation to 
cover up failures at home by a "spirited foreign policy," 
and Democracy makes for war because the masses are 
easily inflamed. So far from this being the last war, the 
cult of war-glory has spread — not without cause — to the 
hitherto almost bloodless regions of Australia and New 
Zealand, as Kant feared it would when the masses were 
no longer the mere pawns of monarchies. "We have 
painted the Southern Pacific pink" writes an Australian 
proudly. 

Contiguity makes for war — two schools will always 
fight; so will town and gown. It looks as if every atom has 
both an attractive and a repulsive force towards every 
other. 1 Add to these war-factors the personal quarrels 
of monarchs and statesmen (or their women kind) and the 
chapter of accidents, and you will see against what titanic 
forces Mr. Carnegie arrays his posse of professors and 
pamphleteers. Even if there were no other causes of war, 
the great historic and romantic tradition would suffice to 
kindle it. No generation likes to die without seeing this 
famous thing — War — with its own eyes. Every generation 
must have its war, and so the latest date for The Next 
War is fixed by the life of the generation now being born. 

1 "The houses of the ancient city of Lincoln are divided," says Charles 
Lamb, "between the dwellers on the hill and in the valley. This marked 
distinction formed an obvious division between the boys who lived above 
(however brought together in a common school) and the boys whose pa- 
ternal residence was on the plain; a sufficient cause of hostility in the code 
of these young Grotiuses. My father had been a leading Mountainer; and 
would still maintain the general superiority, in skill and hardihood, of the 
Above Boys (his own faction) over the Below Boys (so they were called), 
of which party his contemporary had been a chieftain." 



ARMS AND THE MAN 

"If we consider gunpowder as an instrument of human destruction, 
incalculably more powerful than any that skill has devised or accident 
presented before, acquiring, as experience shows us, a more sanguinary 
dominion in every succeeding age, and borrowing all the progressive 
resources of science and civilization for the extermination of mankind, 
we shall be appalled at the future prospects of the species, and feel 
perhaps in no other instance so much difficulty in reconciling the 
mysterious dispensation with the benevolent order of Providence." — 
Hall am: Europe During the Middle Ages. 

My little children lie sleeping in their beautiful home by 
the sea, lovely little heads haloed in curls, gentle little souls 
in dreamless innocence. And at any moment through the 
starry silence of the night may come shrieking and crash- 
ing a shell that will rend and shatter home and babes in 
one fell fury. Blindly it may hurtle, from an invisible 
telescope-eyed metal monster twenty miles at sea, along a 
curve rising higher than Mont Blanc, and I am helpless 
against it; more helpless than was the lonely farmer of the 
prairie against the Red Indian. But as a citizen, I am 
responsible for the belchings of similar monsters against 
alien babes in opposite sea-places, and my little ones will 
grow up to wield the same, or still more devilish, gun- 
power, nay even now — in all their fragile beauty — could 
send the electric spark to explode the mass of cordite that 
hurls the ton of matter through the air at three thousand 
feet a second. It is surely time for humanity to take stock 
of its situation. 1 

1 The famous Skoda gun, says a newspaper, sends a "Pilsener" shell which 
kills everyone within 150 yards and kills many who are further off. The 

104 



ARMS AND THE MAN 105 

When the three Brobdingnagian savants examined 
Gulliver, they could not believe him produced according 
to Nature, since he had no visible means of self-defence, 
not even swiftness in fleeing, and even though his teeth 
proved him carnivorous, science could scarcely find any 
creature that did not over-match him. And indeed before 
man discovered arms, he was as poorly off among his fellow- 
beasts as Gulliver in Giantland. Samson may have rent 
a lion as he would have rent a kid, and Hercules may have 
strangled snakes with his infant fingers, but man's normal 
sinews of war, even though magnified by a primitive Jiu- 
jitsu, would have left him still up a tree. When Herbert 
Spencer and Huxley saw a man bathing, they marvelled — 
so Spencer tells us in his Autobiography — that this creature 
should have secured the hegemony of the planet. But of 
course it was not man naked and natural that became the 
lord of creation, but man armed and unashamed. Brain 
triumphed over brawn, and the hand that tore off the 
branch had grasped the rod of empire. The anthropoid 
apes merely bite and scratch. Alfred Russel Wallace, in- 
deed, was kept at bay by a female orang-outang that threw 

mere pressure of gas breaks in the partitions and roofs of bomb-proof shel- 
ters. Scores of men who escape metal fragments, stones, and showers of 
earth, are killed, lacerated, or blinded by the pressure of the gas. The gas 
gets into the body cavities and expands, tearing the flesh asunder. Some- 
times only the clothes are stripped off, leaving intact the boots. Of men close 
by not a fragment remains; the clothes disappear and only small metal 
articles are found. If the shell is very near the explosion melts rifle barrels 
as if they were struck by lightning. Men who disappear in such explosions 
are often reported missing, as there is no. proof of their death. 

This instrument of Twentieth Century Civilization weighs 2,800 lbs. 
It has a normal trajectory of 4^2 miles high and in soft ground it penetrates 
twenty feet before exploding, which takes place two seconds after impact. 

A "Jack Johnson" can make a hole 40 feet across and 18 feet deep. The 
15-inch " sea-gun" is a tube 58 feet long, weighing 97 tons and wound with 
190 miles of steel ribbon. It hurls a 2,000 lb. shell twelve miles with mar- 
vellous accuracy — each discharge breeds an energy capable of lifting 82,000 
tons! — W. G. Fitzgerald, on The Workshops of War. 



106 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

from her tree a shower of branches and heavy-spined fruits, 
and the chimpanzee can snatch the hunter's spear and 
break it, even turn it against him. But that is the limit 
in the animal world, just as the size of a baby's brain is 
the limit of the gorilla's. 

The proof of the advent of man is found not in his bones, 
but in his stones — the rude flint choppers and borers of 
the River-drift Men. He that was greatest among anthro- 
poids threw the first stone. Slings and arrows were the 
sources of his outrageous fortune. From the sling to the 
17-inch gun is a mere orderly progress through the ballista 
and the matchlock, and the first savage who tipped his reed 
with poison was a Prussian war-lord in embryo. Stone 
gave way to bronze, bronze to steel. The club begot the 
spear and the sword. 

By weapons thus clapped on and not part of his organism 
like his teeth and nails, the cunning brute obtained an 
immense extension of militant power. But this separation 
of arms from the man has had other consequences that 
our race has not yet realized. For all these adjustable 
artifices of offence and defence have dispensed with Time. 
To evolve, say a spear, as an integral part of the organism 
like the tusk of the boar, would have cost a million years. 
But a detachable spear needs only to be invented to be at 
once transmissible to the next generation. And in dodging 
Time, a monster has been created more uncanny than 
Frankenstein's. 

For when a fighting apparatus is naturally developed 
from within, it bears a reasonable proportion to the rest of 
the creature. It is in living relation with the whole organ- 
ism, and to evolve it some portion of the total vital energy 
must be subtracted and specialized. An artificial weapon is 
not only in no necessary relation or proportion to the 
wielder, but being indefinitely variable, gives him an infinite 



ARMS AND THE MAN 107 

range of deadliness. Of the multiform organs of militancy 
developed by Nature in the struggle for existence, and dis- 
tributed among the different species, man adopted all — the 
dagger-claws of the tiger, the bayonet-horns of the bull, the 
poison-fangs of the cobra, the mail-plate of the crocodile. 
He became less an animal than an armory. By traps he 
borrowed the sinister passivity of the spider, by saps and 
mines he copied the mole, by barbed wire he simulated 
the spines of the porcupine. The fox was out-rivalled by 
his tricks, the skunk out-stunk by his gases, the cuttle- 
fish troubled the waters less foully. And now this crown 
of creation has taken on a new amphibious existence as a 
bird of prey in the air and a fire-spitting dragon of the deep. 1 
If self-preservation is the first law of nature, and if, as 
Spinoza taught, the effort to preserve our being according 
to its essence is virtue, we cannot find combat immoral. 
Every creature must secure its food and its mate, and pro- 
tect its young, and in so far as its fighting is conditioned 
by its necessities and corresponds to its feelings, the crea- 
ture is within the moral order. So long, therefore, as man 
relied on his thews and his teeth, the ethical situation was 
simple. But the supplanting of thews and teeth by artifi- 
cial weapons complicated the position. 2 For one thing, 
it split up the species, creating almost a new sex of non- 

1 That is why there can be no Superman. The real literal Superman is 
already here in the shape of the man in the Zeppelin, who hovers over us, — 
according 4o his own confession — like a god. We can no longer evolve 
externally; internally we have been evolving all the time, but our accidental 
Supermen, Buddha, Moses and Plato have not managed to perpetuate them- 
selves. 

2 As controversy equalizes fools and wise, so gunpowder equalizes Hercules 
and Tom Thumb. A letter sent from France, and quoted in the Times of 
January 24, 1916, says: "We had an officer killed, Lovell. He was a splendid 
man 6 ft. 5 in. in height and an absolute Hercules — it makes one furious to 
think that the man who fired the infernal grenade that killed him was very 
likely a puny, little weak-chested man, whom he could have crushed with 
one hand. In the old days Lovell would have been worth ten ordinary men." 



108 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

combatants who in time became the majority even of the 
males. These having never handled a tool of war, nor 
cultivated even their natural lethal powers, became as 
helpless as lambs or nestlings, and distracted the social 
system by a double standard of ethics, one code crying 
that homicide was murder and the other that when nation- 
alized it was a glory. And what made confusion worse 
confounded was that it was the civilians who were apt to 
idealize war and to flatter their protectors with poems and 
titles, while the soldiers tended to value most the civilization 
which they defended. 

So long, however, as man confined himself to simple 
weapons, righting remained human and natural. Weapons 
that do not leave the hand are merely an extension of it. 
The sword and the swordsman, arms and the man, are one. 
For by the psychological "law of eccentricity" our sense 
of our personality extends to the tip of whatever we hold. 
Even arrows and bullets that found their billet within a 
visible range of yards left some sense of corporeal partici- 
pation. If the effect was greater than the effort, it was at 
least humanly measurable; the enemy could be seen and 
hated. But with the coming of cannon all the human side 
of war vanished. The elephant's trunk, as every schoolboy 
knows, can pick up a pin and uproot a tree. But it does 
not uproot the tree without a living straining sense of the 
reality of the operation. The firer of the latest 24-inch 
Austrian mortar, by an effort no greater than the picking 
up of a pin, uprooted a tower eleven miles off with his first 
shot. The cataclysm evoked by a gunner utterly transcends 
his own muscles, perceptions or emotions. He is an un- 
feeling and therefore immoral agent of destruction. He has 
sunk from a man to a mechanism. Such a fury of malef- 
icence as would wear out a tiger in an instant — it actually 
wears out a 12-inch gun in twelve seconds — leaves the 



ARMS AND THE MAN IO9 

gunner coolly renewing his inner tube. Had this colossal 
killing-power been developed inside and not outside his own 
organism, man — unless he became a mere appendix to his 
own hypertrophied lethal organ— would have had to grow 
proportionately in bulk, in feeling, and in brain. Not even 
Swift's Brobdingnagians, whose swords were forty feet long, 
would have sufficed to embody a duct that at one discharge 
can kill off thirty horses miles away and scoop a hole huge 
enough for their sepulture. To dare serve a Krupp or 
Armstrong gun, one should be as tall as an Alp, as good 
as an Angel, as wise as a God. A man lives up to the ex- 
treme height of his moral and physical nature when he 
dares to loose an arrow from the bow-string. 1 

But Time will not be cheated and Nature has not gone 
unavenged. If the forces man sets in action transcend his 
sensorium, they also surpass its endurance. Throughout 
Nature — which is perpetual war — the forces to be resisted 
are to every creature constant and familiar. But man's 
war, which is spasmodic and discontinuous, is an Inferno 
beyond the worst dreams of Dante, to which our nervous 
system is quite unequated. Men trained in peace, or even 
for it, are suddenly swathed in lyddite fumes from shells, or 
asphyxiating gases from cylinders, bespattered with flying 
brains and bowels and limbs, tortured by the groans of their 
comrades agonizing helplessly between the rival trenches, 
or by the odor of their putrefaction, and deafened by the 
screech and thunder of great guns roaring for their prey. 

1 It may be urged that the hand that serves the gun is really but one of 
the hands of the race, which is Briarean manually and also — by the size of 
its united legs — Alpine. This perhaps makes the distinction between murder 
and killing in war. It would only be if a man used a gun for his private ends 
that it would be murder, and this consideration might be pointed out to the 
"conscientious objector" who "objects to murdering." On the other hand, 
even the race united can hardly be said to possess the goodness or omnis- 
cience qualifying them to serve a Krupp gun. 



IIO THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

What wonder if in such a hellish hurly-burly the higher 
nerve-centres are disintegrated, and men revert to a primi- 
tive somnambulistic sub-consciousness, deaf, dumb, and 
blind; or if, as Professor Gaupp tells us, the stoutest Prus- 
sian soldiers break down in madness, paralysis, convulsions, 
aphasia, and delirium? x For it is an environment out of 
all relation to our nervous system, more dreadful than 
Mother Nature has set any creature to face. Had we at 
least evolved our own shelling apparatus or poison-gland, 
the rest of our organism would have evolved pari passu 
and our cells and ganglions would have accommodated 
themselves in the course of the aeons to our lethal organ. 
But in our fatal haste to grasp at results, in our severance 
of arms and the man, we have entirely outreached and out- 
gone ourselves. Even those who can habituate their nerves 
to this man-made hell cannot bequeath their equilibrium. 

Is it not high time that — with the exception of a few rifles 
against the animals we have still left our superiors — we 
humans should use up our bombs to blow up all our other 
armaments, and if we must needs quarrel among ourselves, 
return to fisticuffs? 2 

1 See also Major Mott's Lettsonian Lecture, before the Medical Society 
of London, on "The Effects of High Explosives on the Central Nervous 
System." 

2 1 was walking in the Wordsworth country with a world-famous chemist, 
when, discussing ' disapprovingly the misapplications of chemistry to war 
and the ceaseless quest for still greater powers of destruction, he suddenly 
startled me by saying "They might blow up the world." He meant seriously 
that radium had disclosed such unexpected new forces with which the 
chemists might accidentally interfere. I could not help thinking that it 
would be a very fitting ending for our murderous breed, though I hoped it 
would be German "efficiency" that would do the deed. 



THE RUINED ROMANTICS 

"Clear-singing, clean slicing; 
Sweet-spoken, soft-finishing, 
Making death beautiful. 
I am the Will of God, 
I am the Sword." 

Henley's Song of the Sword. 



That is what the poet used to sing. "I am the gas-bag" 
would be nearer the mark to-day. And for the protagonist 
of the defence: "I am the sand-bag." The sword is 
obsolescent. Some Italian troops use the heavy four-foot 
daga but the British officer mostly finds his sword an en- 
cumbrance, and its chief use now in England is as an orna- 
ment for civilians at Court receptions. "The Will of God" 
is now the Zeppelin bomb, the asphyxiating gas, the torpedo, 
or the liquid fire of the German squirters, the results of 
which at Ypres, according to a British officer interviewed 
by the Liverpool Daily Post was to burn our soldiers' faces 
"out of all recognition to the human form." And the pic- 
ture of our troops before the advancing flames is a grim 
transformation of our traditional war-pictures — this "line 
of men as far along as one could see, mopping their brows, 
from which sweat was streaming:" this combination of 
Hell and the Turkish Bath, relieved only by the irrepressible 
humor of the private, who opined that so much sweat would 
put out the fires by the time they reached the ranks. 

The romantic Ruskin, writing in 1864, warned our sol- 
diers that they "were never meant to be blown out of en- 



112 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

gines nor to fight by chemistry" and predicted that at the 
rate they were going they would soon come to poisoned 
bullets. Civilized nations, he laid it down, "should settle 
their quarrels as civilized men do, on terms, and with choice 
of weapons." Modern warfare was unchivalrous — as if 
duellists should throw vitriol in each other's faces. The 
logical Junker, to whom war was not a theatrical tourna- 
ment, but a scientific ruthlessness, answered like the man 
on London Bridge in "One of Our Conquerors," "none of 
your damn punctilio." And in the end humanity may be 
grateful to him for having stripped war of its last veil of 
chivalry and cast upon its crude nakedness the searchlight 
of hell. Now we can say of war, as Dryden said of Vice, 
that it is 

"A monster of such fearful mien 
As to be hated needs but to be seen." 

But more corrosive to the war-ideal than even the vitriol 
Ruskin thought ungentlemanly, is the tedium of the 
trenches. "War has become stupid, war is dull" complains 
the Times military correspondent, and the men yawn with 
him. War in fact is as dull as the ditchwater in which the 
men stand, and Romance has been driven literally to her 
last ditch. In the words of Punch 

"Don't picture battle-pieces by the lurid Press adored, 
But miles and miles of Britishers in burrows badly bored." 

Here then lies a new hope for humanity. War is worse 
than a crime, it is a bore. 1 

1 "One of the first elements of successful strategy is surprise. In the old 
days a general of genius could outflank his foe by a forced march or lay 
some ingenious trap or ambush. But how can you outflank a foe who has 
no flanks? How can you lay an ambush for the modern Intelligence De- 
partment, with its aeroplane reconnaissance and telephonic nervous sys- 
tem? . . . What could Napoleon himself have done under the circum- 
stances? One is inclined to suspect that that volcanic megalomaniac would 



THE RUINED ROMANTICS I13 

II 

And — as if in symbolic harmony — the colors of war are 
faded too. The prosaic necessity of invisibility has ousted 
the peacock vainglory and the rainbow pride. The tartan — 
our last symbol of the joy of battle — -will scarcely enliven 
another war. Khaki like a yellow fog swathes everything — 
it is for romance The Yellow Peril. True, the Germans 
still keep touches of the old palette. Mr. Powell's unfor- 
getable picture of the German Entry into Antwerp gave 
us glimpses of burnished steel, befrogged jackets and fur 
busbies and silver-gray and bottle-green uniforms, and some 
of the French too are in the key of blue. But a day in the 
clay and ooze of the trenches sadly tarnishes this bravery. 
And even the cavalry — sesquipedalian, flamboyant— must 
crouch as mere bipeds. 

Indeed, M. Georges Scott, the artist, laments that 
"modern warfare has absolutely nothing to do with colors. 
It is a symphony in sound. . . . The war is the end of the 
battle-painter since, apart from curiously lucky circum- 
stances, there is absolutely nothing to paint." "This war," 
says the Times correspondent briefly, "is anonymous and 
invisible . . . the butchery of the unknown by the unseen." 

But perhaps the subtlest force that is sapping what 
James Grant called "The Romance of War" is the belated 
recognition that the soldier is only one of its factors. 
General Petain himself, the heroic defender of Verdun, 
says it is "a war of Workshops." And it is by an irony of 
history that on the very day Conscription entered the 
British Calendar, our war-lord, our grim English Odin, 
Kitchener, was forced to preach economy to the nation in 
the civic Guildhall. 1 

have perished of spontaneous combustion of the brain." — The First Hundred 
Thousand, by Ian Hay. 

1 "We have two great armies now" he said, "not only the army in the 



114 THE WAR F0R THE WORLD 

The humor of these appeals for economy is fit to make the 
angels weep. "The cost of the shells fired at Suchez" says 
the official report, "would suffice to build it up again fifty 
or a hundred times." This is not to consider the cost of 
keeping the armies there to fire them. And Mr. Pollen 
tells us that a light craft like the sentinel Arethusa uses up 
ten times the horse-power that keeps going a great northern 
factory, with two to three thousand hands. 

Ill 

It is a pity that just when the steed and the sword were 
vanishing, air-ships and submarines should come to restore 
the lost picturesqueness of war. But even at its most 
spectacular, war is for most civilized people a mere savage 
survival. The very laborers in my village remark that they 
thought we had outgrown it. "Oi did think us had grown 
past that at this toime o'day." x They do not know Dr. 
Keith's demonstration that man is at least a million years 
old. But they feel instinctively that he is old enough to 
know better. 2 

field, but the other army, consisting of the whole of the civil population at 
home — and the army in the field" he confessed bathetically, "could not last 
a single day without the efforts of the civilian population behind it." Poor 
Romance ! Economy, the most bourgeois of the virtues, is then as martial as 
daredeviltry. Even the urchin who refuses to have his face washed is saving 
soap, which seems, like everything else, including milk, to be convertible 
into explosives by our chemical devils, the milk of human kindness curdled 
indeed! 

1 Mr. Roger Fry after a recent visit to France reports the same thing, that 
the peasants regard war as an anachronism. "C'est trop bete, la guerre." 

2 "I am watching this war in its effects upon the masses. I believe that 
never before in the history of the world was the futility of war seen more 
clearly by democracy. The miner in the Aberdare village no longer regards 
the miner elsewhere as an enemy or a 'furriner,' and he is asking himself 
now, 'what is the good of war?' And the answer he makes is 'Rotten.' " 
General Bramwell Booth, interviewed by Harold Begbie. Daily Chronicle, 
March 8, 1916. 



THE RUINED ROMANTICS 115 

"I call it 'orse-play," said the indignant soldier in Punch, 
when he was toppled over by a shell and covered with 
earth. That one of Punch's immortal words, '"Orse-play" 
is exactly what war is — a tragically gigantic gambolling, a 
super-shoving and hustling, a lubberly cyclopean sky- 
larking, a Brobdingnagian snowballing. 1 The larrikins of 
literature, the hooligan Bernhardis, the Peter Pans of 
poetry may imagine war vitally important, but in essence it 
is a Titanic tomfoolery that is noisy without being funny. 
And withal so irrelevant to the real war for the world. I 
never felt this so strongly as when, turning from the news- 
papers, I read Henry James's novel: The Ambassadors; 
whereof I wrote, "It makes the war-books ridiculous. A 
world, which has arrived at such fineness of impression and 
such depths of spiritual beauty as are evidenced in this 
masterpiece has no more to do with crude cannon-balls and 
silly shells than wolves and tigers have to do with the Ninth 
Symphony or the differential calculus." 



IV 

No, for those who have "the joy of battle," war may be 
natural enough. 

"Let dogs delight to bark and bite 
For 'tis their nature to." 

But let us leave it to the Serbians, any of whom would 
gladly die if he could spit two Bulgarians on one spear, 2 
to the Montenegrins, or the Senegalese who collect ears 

1 Since this was written "avalanche" warfare has actually begun. 

2 "They seemed to be obsessed with a determination to get their bayonets 
into the Bulgarians' bodies, laughing at them as their foes lay mortally 
wounded on the ground. Detached groups at a hundred places along the 
battle front, stabbed, clubbed, bit and choked savagely." — Lotus Edgar 
Brown, quoted in Times, December 22, 191 5. 



Il6 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

and noses as the Red Indians collected the scalps, to the 
Turcos, two hundred of whom, according to the Gaulois, 
slid secretly on their stomachs and bayoneted seven hun- 
dred and ninety-two Bodies in ten minutes. For these 
and their likes — e. g., the British cavalry officer who wrote 
home "We had an amusing time, chasing Uhlans" — war is a 
glorious romp: and for them it may be as Kipling says, "The 
lordliest life on earth." Far otherwise is it with the likes of 
the poor Professor of Latin at the University of Bonn 
whose diary, published in the Times, revealed the pitiful 
slavery of the private's life under jackboot Junkerdom. A 
typical entry (September 27th) says: "One gets stunted in- 
tellectually. One has no longer a single idea except to keep 
going physically. Always the same longing for peace, and 
before my eyes the spectre of the French front close at 
hand, with the horrors of its artillery fire." 

There is a German proverb about not chopping up the 
piano to light the fire. Imagine using a University Professor 
for Kanonenf utter. 

V 

"Glory of war" writes a Colonial from the Dardanelles, 
" is a thing of the past." And indeed nearly every one of 
my own acquaintances at the Dardanelles was down with 
dysentery, which does not seem to be even counted in the 
casualties, unless death lends it a little dignity. 

Early in the war — through my perilous habit of "walking 
in war-time" — I was captured by a British officer and made 
to address his men. The khaki congregation, young re- 
cruits in all the pride of life and limb, squatted in the 
meadow and I stood, like Abraham of old, in the door of a 
tent. It was a picturesque scene, growing more romantic 
as the light faded and my discourse soared to the stars that 
came out to listen. I spoke of national righteousness, of 



THE RUINED ROMANTICS I17 

duty, and glory, and how they must shame the Goths by 
chivalry to their women and children. "Thank you, thank 
you," cried the Captain, fervently grasping my hand, when 
my heroic accents died on the perfumed darkness of the 
summer night. "You have saved me my evening exhorta- 
tion. I was about to address them on lice!" How many 
of these young knight-errants have since been infected with 
typhus by these unromantic insects I know not, but it is the 
pediculi more than the Germans that have devastated 
Serbia. ' ' They have practically taken possession of Serbia, ' ' 
wrote a doctor to the Times. "Rats and lice enjoy this 
warm weather," writes a British soldier from a front trench 
in Flanders. 

"The lordliest life on earth" — or the lousiest — appears 
also to lead to insanity — whether the madness of melancholia 
or of terror. The Austrian asylum of Steinhof has had to 
be enlarged to receive the patients from the front. And this 
lordly life has begotten new diseases— now a novel form 
of neuritis, anon a trench fever credited to the bites of body 
parasites — the real lordly livers. The old diseases of course 
flourish more vigorously than ever — the list reads like one 
of the passages Zola penned so unctuously in Lourdes: 
"Typhoid, tetanus, paratyphoid A and B, jaundice, dys- 
entery, spotted fever." 

The marvel is that madness does not overtake whole 
battalions. For not in Dante's Inferno, nor in Poe at his 
most gruesome, nor in all the literature of horror, nor in 
the wildest pictures of Wiertz can anything be found even 
to equal the simple statements of the war-reports. In the 
Artois, says Mr. Buchan, "the French parapets are prac- 
tically composed of dead Germans." We read of valleys 
turning into volcanos, of "heads and limbs flying in all 
directions," "of men wading through a sunlit blue sea that 
turns red, of chips of Alpine granite blinding seventy thou- 



1 1 8 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

sand Austrians in six months, of ravines solidified with stand- 
ing corpses. "There were bunches of corpses caught upon 
our barbed wire defences," says a French war report. There 
are all manner of wounds, writes Mr. Alfred Stead in the 
Daily Express — "men without the bottom of their faces, 
men who have lost noses, eyes and ears. . . . The smell 
of blood was heavy in the church, the incense of the world 
to the God of War — -that sickening smell which affects 
even the surgeons more than the most horrible wounds. . . . 
In the space before the altar were the worst cases. When I 
went in, there were four dying in agony, the cries, despite 
injections of morphia being frightful, and the writhing 
limbs and convulsed features unforgettable. They all died 
in the night." 

"Then hell broke loose," writes the London News Agency 
of the fight at Neuve Chapelle, ". . . in some places the 
troops were smothered in earth and dust, or even spattered 
with blood from the hideous fragments of human bodies 
that went hurtling through the air. At one point the upper 
half of a German officer, his cap crammed on his head, 
was blown into one of our trenches. 

"The slaughter was sickening. In front of one of the bri- 
gades the Bavarians, coming along at the ambling trot 
adopted by the German infantry at the assault, and bawling 
'Hourra!' in the approved fashion, blundered into the fire 
of no fewer than 21 machine guns. The files of men did not 
recede or stagger. They were just swept away. One 
moment one had the shouting, ambling crowd before one's 
eyes; the next moment, where it had been, lay a writhing, 
convulsed pile of bodies heaped up on the brown earth." 
Karl von Wiegand writes from Isonzo to the New York 
World: "The south-western knob of San Michele is known 
as the ' Mountain of Corpses' from the heaps of Italian dead 
there in front of the Austro-Hungarian trenches, into which 



THE RUINED ROMANTICS 119 

is flung a veritable hail of shells, at times rending, tearing, 
and throwing fragments of the long dead in all directions, 
a picture declared to be beyond imagination in ghastliness 
and stench." Even the cemeteries are shelled, according to 
Lord Northcliffe, and one sees open coffins, shrouded corpses 
and grinning skulls. 

The explosion of a mine underground, writes a Petrograd 
correspondent, ''leaves no sign above ground of the awful 
catastrophe that has occurred below. The horrors of such 
fighting defy the imagination and cannot be described by 
those who have survived." It is mechanical murder. 
Similar unspeakable horrors, I remember, with no sporting 
chance of romantic defence, were recorded by the Times 
of the bombardment of the Blucher, as the effects of our 
shells exploding in confined space, dreadful blastings and 
hurlings, and bodies cut in two by closing hatches. 1 A 
French soldier presses a button and explodes a mine as a 
German division is going through the Bois des Caures — 
and the division appears. I know nothing in literature 
surpassing the simple words of the Paris journalist: "A 
tremendous 'bourn.' Trees mixed with strange shapes 

1 " In the engine-room a shell licked up the oil and sprayed it around in 
flames of blue and green, scarring its victims and blazing where it fell. Men 
huddled together in dark compartments, but the shells sought them out, and 
there death had a rich harvest. 

" The terrific air pressure resulting from explosion in a confined space, left a 
deep impression on the minds of the men in the Blucher . . . Closed iron 
doors bend outward like tinplates, and through it all the bodies of men are 
whirled about like dead leaves in a winter blast, to be battered to death 
against the iron walls. 

"There were shuddering horrors, intensified by the darkness or semi-gloom. 
As one poor wretch was passing through a trap-door a shell burst near him. 
He was exactly half-way through. The trap-door closed with a terrific 
snap. In one of the engine-rooms men were picked up by that terrible 
Luftdruck, like the whirl-drift at a street corner, and tossed to a horrible 
death amidst the machinery. There were other horrors too fearful to re- 
count." (Times, February, 1915.) 



120 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

sprang into the air. Terrible cries were heard and then the 
silence of death." Another version of a similar pressing 
of a button (reported by the Petit Journal) says the effect 
was "like an infernal waterspout amid this human sea. 
And through the whirlwind of smoke, iron and fire, I see 
faces horribly distorted, arms, legs and trunks of men 
hurled high in the air as though cast into the sky from a 
diabolic volcano. The wave of Germans advancing like 
a great avalanche and singing the Wacht am Rhein is 
broken, and a vast crater is filled with German corpses." 
"Day and night," says the diary of a German officer, "our 
hands and our feet were, at every moment, coming in 
contact with unnameable things that had once been human 
bodies. When you stand behind a barrier, four men deep 
of these horrible things — " 

The notion of distributing V. C.'s or Iron Crosses under 
such conditions is an anachronism, a relic of old romance. 
The heroism of humanity simply takes my breath away. 
Every man in the trenches is a hero, braver than Agamem- 
non. Or perhaps the truth is that no man is a hero. Cour- 
age can be acquired by practice, it can be taught, writes a 
British officer. Who does not remember Turenne saying 
to his body: "Tremblest thou? Thou shalt tremble still 
more before I have done with thee!" According to a Ger- 
man pyschologist, the soldiers in the trenches revert to sub- 
humanity. Caught between their officers and overlords 
behind, and the vomiting iron jaws in front, they develop 
a sombre sense of fatality, and move like somnambulists to- 
wards their appointed doom. 

VI 

Nor are the effects of war outside the camps altogether as 
ennobling as the Romantics pretend. Mixed with a great 



THE RUINED ROMANTICS 121 

uplifting of the nation in sacrifice and goodwill, and a re- 
newed sense of nationality, and a healthy trans-valuation 
of values, is also a sordid greed on the part of a large com- 
mercial minority that — incredible as it sounds — would 
rather see profit than Peace. 1 The moral consciousness 
and political sense of the nation disintegrate and every- 
thing is sacrificed to the elemental passion for victory. 
To hear hecatombs of our enemies and the shipwreck of 
their argosies gives us a living satisfaction. The sense of 
reality is dulled, catastrophies that would have set Emperors 
and Presidents cabling condolences no longer stir the 
faintest thrill of sympathy. In England there is, according 
to the Times, a "Heavy toll on child life indirectly traceable 
to the war," a "dangerous wastage." But in Germany 
and England a serious degeneration of school-children is 
noted, alleged to be due to the absence of the fathers. The 
Cologne Gazette says that crimes of violence have increased 
alarmingly in young people of both sexes between sixteen 
and twenty-six, and the Governor of Cologne draws the 
attention of the municipality to the outbreak of pickpocket- 
ing by boys of from five to ten, while boys of from eight to 
twelve are becoming skilled cracksmen. The Berliner 
Tageblatt says "the German people are in danger of being 
wholly submerged beneath the extraordinary wave of laxity 
and immorality that is breaking over the country." The 
Deutsche Tages Zeitung describes the "appalling amount of 
open and flagrant immorality," and ascribes it to the 
high wages young people are getting in factories. But in the 
rural districts also all sense of decency is being swept away. 
Drastic sumptuary laws for children under seventeen — 
tobacco, snuff, books and films, — are being everywhere 
enacted. Cigars and alcohol are forbidden to children 

1 Twenty-five per cent was yesterday paid for the " risk" of peace breaking 
out before the end of the year. {Times, March 17, 1916.) 



122 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

under twelve. Eugenically of course, war combines a 
lowered birth-rate with an increased death-rate among the 
most virile elements. 

VII 

" Shall we never shed blood? " wistfully wailed that incur- 
able Romantic, Stevenson, comrade in letters of the author 
of The Song of the Sword, bedridden both. They dreamed 
of being soldiers because they were invalids, and of being 
seamen because they were not able-bodied. 1 It is to be 
hoped the manes of these "literary gents" are satisfied now. 
It would be no unfitting hell for these frivolous Romantics 
to be compelled to witness the measureless agony of this 
war, the suffering of mules and horses, as well as of men, 
women and children; the illimitable carnage and bestiality, 
the insanities, suicides, hangings, shootings, crucifixions, 
buryings, or burnings alive, diseases, exiles, and anguishes; 
to hear the innumerable moans of milkless infants, and see 
every gate to death open and besieged by agonizing queues. 
The only excuse one can find for Henley and Stevenson 
(and the school they created) is that they had no imagina- 
tion. They lived remote from Mars and could see only 
its ruddy splendor. 

In the presence of the war itself our poets are dumb, 
or if they speak it is of its spiritual inspirations, its intel- 
lectual ironies or its psychological incongruities. Of the 
old joy of battle there is not a trace. The poor ruined 
Romantics! Even Kipling, who but for the Grace of God 
might have been Poet Laureate of Prussia, has not egged 
on the slaughter. Indeed with the close of the South 
African war and the publication of his great pacificist poem, 
The Settler, his career as a Tyrtaeus seems to have ended. 

1 There died the other day another of Henley's colleagues on the National 
Observer who like Henley himself was a cripple, 



THE RUINED ROMANTICS 1 23 

That wonderful poem — of an Old Testament greatness — 
is Kipling's real Recessional. And his vilification of the 
"senseless bullet" and the "barren shrapnel," and his 
glorification of the "holy wars" of united mankind against 
the evils of Nature, mark the public bankruptcy of the 
ruined Romantics. 



ON THE COAST 

"Let me fall now into the hand of the Lord . . . but let me not 
fall into the hand of man." — (King David's Prayer.) 

" Black within and without 
Save a lamp-circle falling 
On that page that at midnight 
I sit peacefully scrawling. 

"Crash and boom, from afar! 
Life seems suddenly dearer! 
I must warn all the household. 
Boom and crash — it is nearer. 

"Then a zigzagging flash 
Splits my terror asunder. 
Thank God, it is only 

His lightning and thunder! " 



124 



THE GODS OF GERMANY 

"Die germanischen Gottergestalten, woran freilich kein be- 
sonderer Kunstsinn gemodelt hatte, und die schon vorher so miss- 
mutig und triibe waren wie der Norden selbst." — Heine. 

I. — The Old Heathen Gods 

Hans Richter, the great conductor, once told me in the 
days when the deranging of London's dinner hour by "The 
Ring" was our idea of a sensational event, that in reading 
or conducting Wagner's music he felt himself in mystic 
union with the old gods of his race. But who were these 
old gods? Tacitus, who has left us a valuable study of 
the Germany of the year 98, and who records incredulously 
the rumor that there were German tribes with human faces 
but the bodies and limbs of wild beasts, reports that the 
chief god was Mercury, and that the Germans propitiated 
him even with human victims. Now Mercury, from whom 
comes the French for Wednesday, was merely the Roman 
name for the Teutonic Odin or Woden, who survives in 
our Wednesday. Mercury was the malevolent god of com- 
merce and gain, and Woden comes from a root meaning 
the furious one; so that the worship of this grim old German 
god seems accurately to foreshadow the contemporary 
combination of " Realpolitik " with Militarism. 

But how could such a god appeal to a musician? Rich- 
ter's Odin was probably the Wagnerized Wotan of the 
"Ring." And the Norse and Icelandic mythology which 
Wagner sophisticated had been already modified by radia- 
tions from Christianity. The old Teutonic races knew 
nothing of Valhalla or the Valkyries— these were the crea- 

125 



126 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

tions of poets of the Viking period working on a microscopic 
basis of folk-myth. But whatever the intellectual falsi- 
fications and fallacies of Wagner, he did undoubtedly set 
out to transcribe the German's "own indigenous national 
world of feelings and tones," and this his subconscious 
genius effected so truly, so far as the mere music was con- 
cerned, as to send the old racial memories vibrating through 
his fellow-Teuton's soul, deep calling unto deep. I imagine, 
however, that what Richter felt was not so much the pres- 
ence of definite old gods as the absence of the Christian. 
Heine pictured the old gods as going into exile underground 
at the triumph of Christ. Where they really went was 
under consciousness. As they had never had any life out- 
side man's mind, so now they became not subterranean but 
subconscious. And it was these submerged strata of pre- 
Christian feeling that Wagner stirred up in Richter. 

It is these pre-Christian strata that, under the inspiration 
of German philosophy, now threaten to rise to the top again 
—not sublimated as art, but in all their crude reality — and 
to resume their sway over the mind of the West, nay, to 
drive it to those extremes of barbarism of which only logic 
is capable, and from which the heathen, in his simple blind- 
ness, would have shrunk in horror. That it was the old 
German gods — "those abortions of blood and mist" — who 
would lead this assault upon Christian civilization was 
prophesied by Heine in that marvellous chapter of his Ger- 
many, in which he figured the German philosopher evoking 
the demoniac energies of old Germanic pantheism, waken- 
ing the ancient Teutonic battle-madness, and rousing Thor 
from his thousand-year sleep to shatter the Gothic cathe- 
drals with his giant hammer, and to send the old German 
thunder — "der deutsche Donner" — crashing as naught 
ever crashed before in the whole history of the world. 
Felix Dahn and the German novelists of the seventies had 



THE GODS OF GERMANY 1 27 

begun coquetting with the old gods and warriors, but by an 
irony of history it was Nietzsche who by shaking what he 
called "the Semitic slave-morality" of Christianity paved 
the way not for the supermorality he preached, but for the 
ancient barbarism. 

Christianity was not, indeed, difficult to shake. A late 
and exotic importation, it had never harmonized with the 
Western temperament, and in the nomadic warriors of the 
Northern forests it was a mere veneer. Peculiarly did its 
universalism clash with European tribalism. It was vain 
for Paul to declare that there should be neither Jew nor 
Greek, neither Scythian nor Barbarian. Nature, says the 
Roman poet, will return even if driven out with a pitch- 
fork. Still more if driven out with a dogma. 

By dint of the Roman Empire, and through its spiritual 
afterglow, the Holy Roman Empire, Christianity did indeed 
achieve an uneasy universalism. But it is significant that 
Germany through Luther was the first to break such Euro- 
pean unity as had been attained by the martyrs and thinkers 
of Christendom. For whatever be the merits or necessity 
of Protestantism, the Reformation was as much a reaction 
of nationalisms as a protest against the corruptions of the 
Church Universal. The treatises of Luther mingled criti- 
cisms of the Papacy with appeals to German patriotism 
against the jurisdiction of a foreign Power. In Switzer- 
land Zwingli likewise combined spiritual reform with a 
political protest against the Pope's claim to raise a Swiss 
levy. Even the countries that remained loyal to Rome 
could only be handled on a loose rein. As for England, the 
jealous national spirit not only shook off the Pope but all 
possibility of communion with the Reformed Churches of 
the Continent. How deep goes the British instinct against 
alien domination may be seen from the shock Thackeray 
received when on his Irish journey he read in the newspaper 



128 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

that the local Bishop had just been consecrated by the 
Pope. "Such an announcement," he wrote in the Irish 
Sketch Book, "sounds quite strange in English, and in your 
own country, as it were; or isn't it your own country?" 
There could not be a clearer or more unconscious identifi- 
cation of religion and country. National boundaries are 
felt to be natural boundaries. Had these boundaries been 
really crossed by Christianity, it is impossible we should 
witness Christians fighting Christians, still less Catholics 
fighting Catholics, or Protestants Protestants. Everywhere 
the old national religion has remained latent beneath Chris- 
tianity, and in moments of peril it is not the angels that 
appear, but the old gods of the race upon their war-horses. 

So long as this atavistic reversion to the tribal theology 
is unconscious, it is comparatively innocuous. It leaves the 
road open for the return of Christianity when the war ends. 
But the wilful German backsliding to heathenism is as 
dangerous as it is ridiculous. Idolatry is catching. Already 
we have George Moore crawling underground — as if 
Heine's fantasy was a geographical reality — in quest of 
old Irish gods. One hears too of fire-worshippers and 
Diabolists. Will some sophisticated Syrian revive the 
cult of Astarte or some intellectually intoxicated Greek the 
Dionysiac festivals? Are we safe even from the Egyptian 
cat? These galvanizations of the dead past are as grotesque 
as that "Primitive - ' Art which chisels with a swaggering 
simplicity the crude wooden dolls that were the savage's 
stride towards complexity. To religion, as to art, self- 
consciousness is fatal. 

II. — The New State Idol 

Less grotesque, if no less perilous, is the German move- 
ment, not to restore old gods, but to give new lamps for old. 
Why should not the modern spirit be as creative as the 



THE GODS OF GERMANY I2Q 

ancient? This is essentially Nietzsche's question, as it is 
the "Leitmotif" of that voluminous work by Houston 
Chamberlain which the Kaiser distributed so lavishly. 
Why be beholden for your religion to Jews, if indeed Jesus 
was not a German? But just as Nietzsche's effort at con- 
struction only achieved destruction, so his apotheosis of 
aristocratic individualism has been answered by the deepest 
abasement of the individual and the greatest glorification 
of the herd known to history since the days of Sparta. 
Well may Nietzsche denounce the State as the coldest of 
all cold monsters; the liar that says "I am the People"; 
the piece of hellish machinery, the "horse of death, rattling 
in the attire of godlike honors." 

Yet it is in this "hellish machinery" that Dr. Stanton 
Coit, of our own Ethical Church, has found such edification 
that in his profound book, The Soul of America, he adjured 
every country to found similar State religions. We are to 
worship each our own national spirit, to the exclusion even 
of whatever God transcends humanity. For every institu- 
tion has its spirit — Eton, Cambridge, the Carlton Club — 
we even speak of esprit de corps and the genius loci — and the 
spirit of the nation should be the real and sufficing centre 
of religion. It is a notion to be found also in the disciples of 
Durkheim. 1 But this religion shatters itself like neo- 

1 Smile Durkheim introduced the study of sociology into the French 
Universities, and being the son of a Rabbi was probably inspired by his 
experience of Ghetto tribalism, which is a reaction from Judaism proper. 
It is perhaps from Durkheim that the notion of group gods, even of village, 
street, family and town gods, comes into French literature through the 
poetry of Jules Romains, who has even written a First Book of Prayers to 
these gods that transcend and transform the individual will. In Russian 
literature Dostoievsky's preachment of "The Russian God" preceded these 
new-fangled theses. Though the title of a popular book on Burmah, The 
Soul of a People has become almost a cant phrase in England, where, how- 
ever, Mr. Lowes Dickinson falls into the opposite error in supposing that 
individualism is the sole rational basis of society. 



130 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

paganism upon the rock of self-consciousness. You can 
sink yourself in worship of a God believed infinite and in- 
effable, but hardly in one whom you know to be merely the 
Spirit of your tribe, mutable and fallible. And how if it is an 
evil spirit, a narrow puffed-up spirit? French patriotism, 
according to Heine, expands the man, warms him towards 
all civilization, whereas "the patriotism of the German is 
shown by his heart becoming narrower and shrinking up and 
drawing in like leather in a frost." And how well Heine 
knew his countrymen we have already seen. "Deutsch- 
land ueber alles" — that Germany's citizens shall put her 
before all their private interests — is a creed which may 
be better for them than none at all, but Prussian patriotism 
is, if not the last refuge of a scoundrel, the last refuge of an 
atheist. Immune from any standard outside itself, it easily 
slides from the ideal of a Germany above all its citizens to 
the ideal of a Germany above all the world — a mistransla- 
tion of its motto into action which justifies the current 
mistranslation into English. 

When Fichte, the preacher of the national patriotic 
education which the Kaiser has fostered, delivered his 
famous "Addresses to the German Nation," in 1808, the 
destiny he put before the young generation was "to found 
an Empire of Mind and Reason — to destroy the dominion 
of mere physical power." But Fichte was speaking after 
Jena, when Prussia lay powerless at the feet of Napoleon. 
The grapes were sour. As soon as Moltke provided the 
sword for a more material Empire, the inherent viciousness 
of State-idolatry became manifest. Communal egoism is no 
more worshipful than individual. Not by worshipping 
themselves but by sacrificing themselves to something 
conceived as larger than themselves, have nations or institu- 
tions become saturated with the spirit of greatness. And as 
the individual requires the State, so the State requires the 



THE GODS OF GERMANY 131 

world and the great international ideals. If Dr. Coit over- 
looked this fatal defect in State-religion, Prussia has prob- 
ably enlightened him by now. 1 

III. — The German Jehovah 

But there is still another German theology, and that the 
most popular of all, with the Kaiser as High Priest. There 
is a German God — "der deutsche Gott" — who has often 
been compared to the old "tribal" Hebrew God, with 
Germany in the role of Israel, and the Hohenzollern as the 
Patriarchs. 2 Were there truth in this comparison, Germany 
would not stand alone in commandeering Israel's God. 
Did not Kipling annex Him in his Song of the English? 

For the Lord our God most high. He hath made the deep as dry 
And smote for us a pathway to the ends of all the earth. 

And the liturgy of the Established Church anticipated 
Kipling. The Romans merely took Palestine. The English 
have taken the whole of its history and literature. 3 But 
they have taken it because — despite all the aberrations and 
iniquities of Imperialism — it represents their own ideal of 

lu We do not stand and shall not place ourselves before the court of 
Europe. Our power shall create new law in Europe. Germany strikes." 
(Maximilian Harden.) 

Similarly Thomas Mann claimed that this is a war of Kultur against 
civilization, and Friedrich Gundolf wrote: "Wer stark ist zu schaffen, der 
darf aucb zerstoren." 

2 "Deutsche religion" seems to have been invented by Friedrich Lange, an 
ex-editor of the Tagliche Rundschau. German world-rule as the rule of the 
German spirit is the note of Rohrbach. That the coming Emperor of Europe 
will be a German Emperor is the thesis of Alfons Paquet. 

3 A wise Englishwoman writes: "It is quite true but that only shows how 
much deeper is our humanity than our nationality. It is interesting, though, 
that in our little village I can refer with more certainty of response to the 
Book of Numbers or the Epistle to the Hebrews than to Shakespeare or the 
History of England." 



132 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

justice for all races. And they have taken it with its 
shadows as well as its lights. For Israel had not only a 
sense of mission, but also a sense of sin. Germany has only 
a sense of mission: no German Kipling has arisen to write 
her Recessional. "It is really because we are pure," 
Pastor Fritz Phillipi told his Wiesbaden flock, " that we have 
been chosen by the Almighty as His instruments to purify 
the world." "Not for thy righteousness or for the upright- 
ness of thy heart," says Deuteronomy, "dost thou go to 
possess their land: but for the wickedness of these nations 
the Lord thy God doth drive them out from before thee." 
The Bible is, in fact, one long indictment of the Hebrew 
race. But outside Nietzsche we look in vain for any casti- 
gation of the Prussian. 1 The Kaiser's God is a mere carica- 

1 "We are morally and intellectually superior to all men. We are peerless. 
So too are our organizations and institutions." Professor Lasson, of 
Berlin. 

Herr Basserman even applies to Treitschke the very words applied by 
Jewish tradition to Moses: "A divinely gifted narrator, the man divinely 
appointed to show to our children and grandchildren the greatness" — not of 
God or His Law but — "of the German nation!" In the same vein Deputy 
Oertel declared that "The German aim of the war is the fulfilment and 
attainment of the world-historical goal which a Higher Being has placed 
before the Deutschtum." Dr. Ernst Dryander, the First Court Preacher, 
wrote an open letter (published in L'Essor, October 10, 1914) to a French 
pastor glorifying God for the perfection of the German and all that is his, and 
rejoicing in His "holy wrath" against Germany's enemies. Professor 
Rheinold Seeby, who teaches theology in Berlin University, wrote in a 
magazine article that Germany loves other nations and when she punishes 
them it is for their own good. Pastor Vorwerk has re-written the Lord's 
Prayer, ending with: " Thine is the Kingdom, the Germanland; may we, by 
help of Thy mailed fist, win the Power and the Glory." Compare on the other 
hand Milton's modification of the British claim: "What does He then but 
reveal Himself to His servants, and as His manner is, first to His English- 
men; I say as His manner is, first to us, though we mark not the method 
of His Counsels and are unworthy." (Areopagitica.) 

These quotations whose authenticity is beyond question make it unim- 
portant whether other preachers have said literally what is attributed to 
them. There is an undoubted stream of tendency in this direction, nor is any 
belligerent country free from it. Herbert Spencer told us long ago of the 



THE GODS OF GERMANY 1 33 

ture of Jehovah, for it is a gross if popular error that the 
God of the Old Testament was a tribal deity with a pet 
people. The very first line of Genesis is universal. "In 
the beginning God created the heaven and the earth." 
The genealogy of all races and colors from Adam strikes the 
same broad note, while Abraham, the founder of Judaism, 
actually asks God, in what I have always considered the 
epoch-making sentence in the Bible, "Shall not the Judge 
of all the earth do right?" A righteous God is not a tribal 
God because a tribe is the first to worship Him. Browning 
was not a cliquey poet because he was at first the poet of a 
clique. The God of Abraham could no more be kept tribal 
than electricity could be kept English because Faraday 
was. Elijah did not rail against Baal as an alien rival god, 
but as an abominable idol. 

The sense of a mission is indeed common to all great 
nations. For Victor Hugo Paris was the city of light, to 
Mazzini Italy was the Messiah. And in the sense of Les- 
sing's fable of the three rings, the world has only to gain 
by this competition in spiritual greatness. A chosen people 
is merely a choosing people, a self-consecrated people, just 
as every poet, artist or prophet feels that he has a call. 1 
But though Israel may have been a chosen people, Jehovah 
was not a Hebrew patriot. He was much more what would 
nowadays be called a "pro-Roman." And to think of Him 
as a Prussian patriot is precisely the Kaiser's blasphemy. 
The Old Testament does indeed show similar backslidings 

British sea-dog, who being pursued by a Dutch frigate, felt sure that the 
wind would change in his favor, for, said he, " God will never desert a fellow- 
countryman." And a perversely beautiful poem in the Times (March 22, 
1916) called To the Fainthearted ended with the lines: 

"Slay on, that so our brother be 

Not dead, but living to the Lord." 
According to Clement of Alexandria the "Called" (k\t)toI) are really 
only those who choose to obey. 



134 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

into tribalism, but this is just what the Hebrew prophets 
were always righting against. The Germans must rejoice, 
Pastor Laible declared at Leipzig, when submarines drown 
the "non-elect." "How can ye rejoice?" God asks Israel 
in the Talmudical legend that rebukes the song of Miriam 
over the drowning of the Egyptians in the Red Sea. "How 
can ye sing when my children are perishing?" There 
speaks the Jewish God. But the German God is not a God 
at all. He is only a German. 1 

lu In August and September: Thou hast vouchsafed us Hohenzollern 
weather. Thou hast helped agriculture by the high prices which it has been 
able to get for its horses from the Army authorities, etc., etc." — Pastor 
Possner's Harvest Sermon. 



MILITARISM, BRITISH AND PRUSSIAN 

" Io non credo diceva; la zanzara . . . che ti cosa al monda viva, la 
quale pia piu utile e ad au tempo piu nobile di me." — Gaspar Gozzi. 

"The pillar on which the Empire rests is the Army." — The Kaiser. 

Since Swift published his tract on The Conduct of the 
Allies in 171 1, no such patriotic pamphleteering has been 
done in England as by Mr. Bernard Shaw in his Common 
Sense about the War. It is all the more regrettable, therefore, 
that he should weaken his case and ours by blurring over 
the common-sense distinction between British militarism 
and Prussian — the one subconscious and defensive, the 
other overconscious and aggressive. The Junker, he tells 
us, is merely (in the dictionary) "a country gentleman," 
and since England indubitably possesses country gentle- 
men, she is as cursed with Junkers as Prussia. On the same 
principle, Taube means "a dove," and since there are doves 
in my garden, there are also death-dealing aeroplanes — and 
of the precise Prussian pattern. The plain fact is, that since 
the young Pomeranian squire, Bismarck, fought his twenty- 
seven duels, the Prussian "country gentleman" in the 
course of caricaturing that man of genius has developed so 
odious a type of militarism that the German name for his 
class stinks in the nostrils of civilization. Mr. Shaw begins, 
indeed, by allotting separate categories to the Junker and 
the militarist, but practically runs the two as synonymous. 
The sober and ornithophilous Sir Edward Grey and the 
dramatic and drill-demented Kaiser are pilloried as a pair. 

Mr. Shaw's pretext for beclouding a distinction, which is 

135 



I36 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

as clear to his uncommon as to my common sense, is that 
in practice British militarism and Prussian work out much 
the same. But then, they are not always in practice, and 
it is not for a writer to put together what a merciful heaven 
has put asunder. There are the times of peace, and in these 
lucid intervals we in England have peace from the soldier. 
His swagger is limited to the parks, his fascination for the 
female sex to the nymphs of the perambulator. When 
Kipling wrote his ballad of Tommy Atkins to correct our na- 
tional coldness toward our defenders, the soldier's uniform, 
instead of striking awe, was a badge of exclusion from the 
theatre and other respectable resorts. In Germany the 
lieutenant is the unquestioned Adonis even of the drawing- 
room, the prostration of the civilian is a by-word. During 
the Boer War we had an eruption of generals' photographs, 
almost ousting the actor from the shop-windows. But the 
moment the war ended, the actor resumed the centre of the 
stage. 

Nor is it only the Prussian Army that is military. The 
same mechanical brutality has infected every department of 
the State, and I have already related how as the President of 
an emigration bureau with ramifications in Germany, I 
have wrestled in vain against the barbarity of railway- 
porters, sailors, and frontier-officials. 

Professor von Mach, of Harvard, makes fun of the claim 
that we are fighting to put down militarism, since England, 
he alleges, spends sixty per cent per capita more for arma- 
ments than Germany. This is a familiar ignoratio elenchi, 
or missing of the point. As if the veriest Quaker would 
not get a watch-dog when burglars were about ! It is not the 
size of the watch-dog, but the worship of the watch-dog, 
that makes militarism. Britain, with possessions scattered 
all over the world, must necessarily have more watch-dogs 
than Germany. Gilbert has observed of the British burglar 



MILITARISM, BRITISH AND PRUSSIAN 137 

that when he is not a-burgling "he loves to lie a-basking in 
the sun." But the German burglar never basks. He reads 
Bernhardi on burgling, attends scientific courses on crib- 
cracking, proves philosophically that larceny is the law of 
the universe, and sings Alsatia ueber Alles. Why, Professor 
von Mach need only consult our marching-songs to see 
with what gay aloofness the Briton marches to war. From 
Armageddon it is a long, long way to Tipperary; yet Tip- 
perary is only typical of all our marching-songs. In a list 
of nearly eighty, traditionally attached to different regi- 
ments, Rule, Britannia occurs only once, and the majority 
of our warriors advance on the enemy to the irrelevant 
strains of Come, Lasses and Lads, The Lincolnshire Poacher, 
and such-like rustic melodies. The self-conscious anti- 
German war songs provided by a Times correspondent 
fell still-born. Rule, Britannia itself dates only from 1740, 
occurring in a Masque of Alfred by a poet, whose real 
achievement was his rustic description of The Seasons, 
and whose most famous line, "To teach the young idea how 
to shoot," has nothing to do with rifles. 1 And even Rule, 
Britannia is more concerned that sea-power shall save the 
islanders from enslavement than that they shall build up 
an Empire by it. It was not till 1689 that Parliament 
consented to legalize a standing army at all, and to this day 
the Army created by the Bill of Rights has — like the meas- 
ure of autonomy conceded to it in 1881 — to be re-legalized 
annually in the House of Commons. If that is not a suffi- 
cient refutation of the Harvard Professor, let it be recalled 
that while the Prussian principle of universal conscription 
has been adopted all over the Continent, not even the 
impassioned crusade of the veteran Lord Roberts, foretell- 
ing the war, could woo England to even the semblance of 

1 It seems to have been taken too literally by poor Pearse, the school- 
master-President of the Irish Republic. 



138 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

conscription. The political genius of England has always 
understood that civilization is— as its name implies — an 
affair of civilians, and hence even the War Office must be 
run by a civilian ! If it is now run by Lord Kitchener, that 
is the exception which proves not only the rule but the 
utter unpreparedness of England. At the greatest crisis in 
her history Mr. Asquith was doubling the parts of Prime 
Minister and War Minister, and our two greatest naval 
experts — Lord Fisher and Sir Percy Scott — were lying on 
the shelf as too old for the burdens of peace! And, despite 
the crisis, and even despite the temporary triumph of con- 
scription, Lord Kitchener is far from being a military 
dictator. Even the militarist Times resents the efforts of 
the Ministry to take shelter under his name and points out 
sternly that the responsibility of the Cabinet remains one 
and indivisible. 

And while the Prussian officer is saturated with the 
Treitschke philosophy of force, and while, as Heine so 
wonderfully prophesied in 1834, the ideas of the German 
philosophers find issue in Berserker blood- rages that stagger 
Christian humanity, the British officer is an amiable 
Christian gentleman, only too occupied with Jerusalem 
and the mysteries of the Beast. Who can imagine a German 
General Gordon? A British Bernhardi is equally incon- 
ceivable. Kitchener himself spent five years in the Pales- 
tine Survey, and excavations for trenches probably interest 
him less than excavations for holy archaeology. Even that 
grim sea-dog Lord Fisher would not subscribe to the creed 
of Bernhardi, though he might practice it. As the peacock's 
tail achieves its splendors without pigment, so Britain has 
achieved her Empire without imperialism. Absent- 
mindedly she has acquired a fifth of the globe, blundering, 
as Joseph Chamberlain pointed out, into some of the best 
parts of the earth, and impeaching her Empire-builders as 



MILITARISM, BRITISH AND PRUSSIAN 139 

often as she has rewarded them. Clive, Warren Hastings, 
Rhodes, were all censured in the House of Commons. It 
took an outsider, Disraeli, even to discover the Empire, 
and all Chamberlain's exhortations to think imperially 
broke themselves against an invincible insularity. Only 
yesterday a powerful section panted to cut away our col- 
onies, those colonies for which Germany would bathe the 
world in blood. It may be urged that subconsciousness so 
deep amounts to stupidity. But I prefer brainless Britain 
to godless Germany. 

This is not to deny that Britain possesses a conscious 
militarist minority — especially in the shape of poets phys- 
ically disqualified, like the lame schoolmaster Tyrtasus, 
from military service. But the Machiavellian Foreign 
Policy imagined by the Continent is a myth. It was not 
even continuous till Hardinge came to the Foreign Office 
to carry out the Edwardian plan of isolating Germany, and 
this policy was merely defensive and apprehensive. It is 
Germany that has refused Mr. Churchill's reiterated over- 
tures to reduce armaments. Her responsibility for the 
present war is as clear to everybody — except Mr. Shaw — 
as her surprise at England's taking a hand in it. Irritated 
by the attempt to paint Germany as a wolf and England 
as a lamb, Mr. Shaw paints England as a lion, with Ger- 
many, apparently, as the lamb. In truth England is a 
gorged lion and Germany a hungry wolf. The one wants 
repose, the other blood. Subconsciously as John Bull 
acquired his Empire, he is morbidly conscious of any at- 
tempt to rob him of a single sterile square inch, and like 
the old squire whose ancestors have annexed common land, 
he regards any examination of his title-deeds as blasphe- 
mous. The Prussian Junker appears to him as a land- 
grabbing parvenu. But it must be admitted that the satis- 
faction of his tenantry — their readiness to die for him — is 



140 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

almost a retrospective justification for his proprietorial 
paternalism. That Germany might well be conceded some 
of his uninhabited land is a proposition the Daily Chronicle 
allowed me to make in London in 19 13, and the Neue Freie 
Presse in Vienna. But the Berliner Tageblatt would not 
print it because of the corollary that Germany in her turn 
must give back Alsace and Lorraine. If force is thus 
nakedly proclaimed as the sole arbiter — if the Germans en- 
dorse Herr Harden's dithyrambs on "the will to power" — 
then no theoretical justification, no Titanic grandeurs of 
effort or sacrifice, can cleanse Germany from the guilt of 
high treason against mankind. For Germany can catch up 
with Britain only by rolling back the planet. And that 
involves rolling it back to a barbarism that combines the 
era of the cave-men with the latest devilries of science. 
Vain for Germany to cry that it is Russia which is the 
enemy of civilization. The Cossack is only a wild beast, 
the German is a wilful beast. The Briton is a beast 
neither by nature nor by design. 



ARMS AND THE BAND 

[Speech at the Mansion House, January 27th, 1915.] 

" Beat! beat! drums! Blow! bugles! blow! 
Make no parley — stop for no expostulation." 

Walt Whitman. 

I feel it a peculiar privilege to be allowed to speak this 
afternoon in support of Mr. Kipling's resolution on behalf 
of so national a cause, inasmuch as we literary men stand 
at this moment — unless we are young enough to stand in 
the trenches — in a somewhat humiliating position. As I 
have complained before, it's a long, long way to literary. 
Indeed a friend of mine who does stand in the trenches 
tells me that literary men should be absolutely silent un- 
less they can say something that will contribute to our 
country's victory. Without altogether agreeing with him, 
I am yet sure he would permit me to break silence this 
afternoon, for it is certain that the movement for which I 
have the honor to plead, and which I feel sure you will 
help to create, will contribute in no small measure to our 
country's victory. Patriotism makes us acquainted with 
strange platform-fellows, but I do not think that Lord Den- 
man who has just spoken should have utilized this oppor- 
tunity to preach conscription. Since he has done so, I 
must also go outside our theme proper and say a word for 
those who like myself, oppose conscription, not because 
it is not the duty of every citizen to serve his country, but 
because under the present military system he loses all his 
civil rights. The bullying in consequence in the Prussian 
Army is a byword. But even in England soldiers have the 

141 



142 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

same feeling that the army is above the law. Even the late 
revered Lord Roberts when called before a civil tribunal in 
some case involving the army disdainfully refused to give evi- 
dence. But the cause we are pleading this afternoon is in- 
dependent of the vexed question imported by Lord Denman. 

There was a king who once offered a reward to anybody 
who would invent a new pleasure. One would have thought, 
such is the multiplicity of appeals to-day in connection 
with the war, that it would be impossible to invent a new 
need. And yet our appeal for martial music is so obvious, 
so simple, that the only wonder is how it escaped being 
invented at the very start of the war. But then we had 
so much to think of — so much indeed, that the only consola- 
tion I can find in our utter unpreparedness for war is the 
proof it affords that at least we did not plan this war, and 
that the responsibility for this monstrous blood-guilt does 
not rest upon the soul of Britain. A measure of responsi- 
bility will rest upon us, however, if, by neglecting to bring 
to bear every force at our disposal, we delay, even by a 
day, the end of the war. And for quickening the pace of 
progress and precipitating the march of victory, there is 
no fresh power that we can call to our aid so potent as the 
power of music. 

Music is an ally worth at least another Balkan State. 
Music to an army or a nation in war time is not a luxury; 
it is a necessity. It is not something that can come after 
gum boots or waterproof overcoats; it is something that 
in a crisis may be more efficacious than either. As Shake- 
speare says: 

" A merry heart goes all the way, 
Your sad tires in a mile-a." 

Music hath charms not only to soothe the savage breast, 
but to lift the tired foot. 



ARMS AND THE BAND 1 43 

But no less important than its effect on the recruiting 
and on the route marches is its effect on the outside public. 
The Times told us recently of a French cartoon in which 
two soldiers are seen under shell fire in the trenches, as 
stout-hearted as they are mud-stained, but wistfully re- 
marking, "If only the civilians will hold out!" There is, 
you see, a reciprocal relation of mutual support between 
the soldiers at the front and the civilians behind them, and 
one reacts on the other. Indeed, M. Delcasse has given 
the name of " internal defence" to those measures which 
are necessary to keep up the moral of the nation. And 
for keeping up a nation's moral it is necessary to call in the 
Muses — the spirits of poetry and song. 

One often sees quoted the sentiment of the utilitarian 
philosopher Bentham that the game of push-pin is more 
useful than poetry. Well, we have forgotten what the game 
of push-pin is, but the poetry of Bentham's contemporary, 
Wordsworth, was found useful in the Times only the other 
day to hearten us up with the sense of the greatness of our 
country. So I imagine, too, that the poetry of Mr. Rudyard 
Kipling may outlast even the game of golf. This useless 
thing — poetry — this apparent literary luxury has become, 
you see, a daily necessity of the newspaper. Just as above 
a certain temperature water turns to steam, so at a certain 
point of national exaltation the prosaic newspaper article 
must needs give place to rhyme and metre. Man cannot 
live by bread alone; the soul in these high moments demands 
nutrition. And so, too, the national spirit at this supreme 
crisis demands to be uplifted by the ubiquitous strains 
of martial music. 

I remember drawing attention, some twenty years ago, 
to the importance of music even in the more humdrum 
affairs of civil life. If our sense of citizenship too often 
fails, may it not be, I asked, because too little appeal is 



144 THE WAR F R THE WORLD 

made to our sense of poetry and color. Our Lord Mayors 
thrill the imagination with their robes and gilded state, 
and there is never any lack of civic pride and consciousness 
among aldermen, or even the Mansion House footmen. 
But for the bulk of citizens there is nothing to remind them 
that they are citizens of no mean city. In the pictures of 
mediaeval processions you will see that each art and craft 
had its costume of honor, even the butcher, the baker, and 
the candlestick maker. In Sicily to this day the very dust- 
cart is glorified by gay paintings all around it. I trace the 
reluctance to pay taxes to the absence of any dramatic 
appeal to our sense of citizenship and any reminder of the 
national uses to which these taxes are put. If the tax- 
collector, instead of coming in the shape of a gray piece 
of paper, came at the head of a band playing national airs, 
we should have a much truer sense of what taxes mean, 
and we should pay them far more cheerfully. The proverb 
talks of paying the piper, but where is the piper to pay? 
How gladly would we pay tribute to his skirling tunes and 
fluttering tartans! But we can only pay the paper, and it 
is a drab and joyless thing to do. 

In this fading out of life and color from our national 
life, only the soldier retained his brave apparel and his joy 
of music, and I pleaded, therefore, that for the better under- 
standing and for the better proportioning of national values 
something of this military gaiety should be infused into 
civil life. Alas! what do we find to-day? Why, even mili- 
tary life has lost its gaiety — it has been infused with our 
civil dulness. Lately there was revived in London a play 
two centuries old — "The Recruiting Sergeant" of Farquhar, 
and to me the only stirring moment of this dreary old 
classic was when the recruiting band marched along with 
its fifes and kettle-drums. I longed to jump on the stage 
and to fight for Queen Anne — though I understand that 



ARMS AND THE BAND 1 45 

she is dead. To-day, confronted by an infinitely greater 
crisis than Queen Anne's England had to face, we go about 
our recruiting in solemn silence. It is the more depressing 
because of the darkness of our streets at night. Berlin is 
blazing with light. The Germans have doubled their 
normal standard — they have the two-power standard in 
lamps if not in ships. No doubt it is not the light of truth. 
Still less is it sweetness and light. But it does keep up the 
spirits of the Germans. Now, I do not complain about our 
darkness, especially if it is a military necessity. I should 
even approve of it were it only a fine piece of symbolism. 
It is right that we should be so constantly reminded of our 
heroes agonizing in alien trenches — it is fitting that we 
in our comfortable homes should have hanging over our 
land this shadow of the wings of the Angel of Death. This 
is a blackness which can, and should be, felt. It is a dark- 
ness which says — "lest we forget!" But if we thus share, 
however faintly and symbolically, the gloom and darkness 
of the battlefield, so have we a right to share its ardors and 
its ecstasies. 

The blind man said that scarlet was like the sound of the 
trumpet. Like the sound of the trumpet, too, is that 
heroic uplift of the civilian's soul as he offers himself for 
his country, and we demand to be reminded of this likewise 
in our daily comings and goings, to feel not only the bodily 
miseries of our soldiers translated into darkness, but also 
their spiritual exaltations translated into music. Music 
helps us to remember that war with all its inevitable evil 
and ugliness has also its soul of nobleness and beauty, and 
that this war in particular is the war of the spirit against 
the spirit of war. 

But though it is wrong that we should have been left so 
long without this symbolism and this inspiriting of music, 
I cannot regret it when I think what a wonderful wealth of 



146 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

heroic service we have tapped — without a single tap of the 
drum. It is sometimes said that war-music is a mere 
intoxication to lure off the thoughtless. It is said that the 
gay clothes of the soldiers are equally alluring, especially to 
females. Well, we have seen tens of thousands of young 
men throwing over their careers, enlisting and marching 
in silence at the mere plain call of duty, drilling in the 
wintry streets without even the mitigated gaiety of khaki 
to stimulate them. It is a spectacle that will ever be re- 
membered among the noblest episodes in English history. 
But now that England has stood this supreme test of her 
moral fibre, there is no need to prolong it. Let the streets 
of London now resound to the music it has so nobly deserved, 
let the music kindle the ardor of sacrifice in those who have 
till now held back, and let it accompany and quicken our 
march to victory. 



THE MODEL MONSTER 

"The State is called the coldest of all cold monsters." — Nietzsche 
on The New Idol. 



Two friends of mine — famous dramatists both — went to 
Germany together some months before the war and came 
back ecstatic over the tidy towns, the absence of poverty, 
the spacious workshops with their insurance and pension 
systems, the artistic railway stations, the high level of 
technical and general education and of literary and es- 
pecially musical taste, — that gave our own composers their 
first hearing — and the general sense of organization and 
efficiency, and they declared with a unanimity rare in 
two men of letters that our slipshod English ways must be 
instantly replaced by a paternal protectionism. Now no- 
body is more painfully aware than I of our British defi- 
ciencies and the ludicrousness of London as a literary or 
musical capital; and I have long considered that the most 
ironic spectacle in the world is our semi-sober, semi-unem- 
ployed street-lounger as the representative of an imperial 
race holding one-fifth of the globe, and ruling one-fourth 
of living humanity. What's Empire to him or he to Em- 
pire? Nevertheless my friends' raptures struck but a 
faint responsive chord in my incorrigibly Victorian breast. 

"Wanting is — what? 
Duty redundant, 
Beauty abundant, 
Where is the blot?" 

i47 



148 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

II 

I remember — before the war — going one sultry August 
day into the princely offices of a Jewish financier of German 
origin, and finding him — to my surprise— enthroned as 
usual before his table, with cables and telegrams coming 
in six-deep and tape-machines ticking out their implacable 
information. I must have expressed my astonishment at 
finding him at work when almost everybody else was at 
play, perhaps surmised it was the secret of his success, for 
I recall that, being in one of his genial moods, the great 
financier went on to trace Anti-Semitism to the resent- 
ment felt for efficiency. The Christian banker, he said, 
expected to come down to his office at eleven and to leave 
at four, to have a long week-end and to hunt twice a week 
in the season ; and then when he saw he was losing business, 
resentment against his successful rivals began to rankle. 
I could not escape a sneaking sympathy with poor John 
Bull thus disconcerted in his debonair way of living. I 
am perfectly aware that the efficiency of its bankers makes 
for the prosperity of the Empire, and, in these times of 
attrition, for its safety even, and if a safe prosperity is the 
test of greatness then the Jewish financier was more pa- 
triotic than his easy-going rivals. But is the game worth 
the candle? Is not the Jewish ideal of a leisurely study 
of holy lore a more desirable way of life? 

Another acquaintance of mine, a professor of chemistry 
at a great provincial university, announced a lecture (dur- 
ing the war) on "How to capture the German dye-trade!" 
Charlie Chaplin himself could not have drawn a more 
numerous or eager audience. "First of all," he began, 
and every ear was pricked up, and every eye glistened, 
"No week-ends!" The faces fell. A dim presentiment 
that German trade was capturing them chilled the ardent 



THE MODEL MONSTER 1 49 

assembly. In point of fact, what did it mean, that Ger- 
many was "dumping" goods on England? That in her 
cousinly devotion to the interests of our masses she was 
toiling day and night to supply them with commodities 
as cheaply as possible. Poor patient, drudging Teuton! 
Pitiful helot, bearing our British burdens! We did not 
want to be a nest of ants with a slave-colony. But if 
Germans ever, ever, ever, will be slaves what is to be done? 

Ill 

It is because Germany has thus speeded up everything, 
that her commercialism is as much a menace to the human 
race as her militarism. True, she only copied British in- 
dustrialism, but by surpassing her model she made it still 
uglier. Aristotle rightly places virtue in the mean, but the 
Germans seem to have borrowed from Oscar Wilde, one 
of their favorite philosophers, the maxim that nothing 
succeeds like excess. My mind goes back wistfully — demo- 
crat though I am — to those sleepy old Courts that Napoleon 
crashed into and Bismarck absorbed, to those petty prin- 
cipalities and Grand Duchies so delightfully described by 
Heine, where the little peoples slumbered at the feet of 
their princes, waking up to say "Guten M or gen, Vatcr," 
whereat the princes answered: "Guten M or gen, meine 
Kinder." It was not only the Princes who were not " ge- 
plagten" in those days. The terrible grind of modern life 
began only, when giant machines arose to take captive 
and enslave the little breed of man, so that their uncanny 
passion for warmth and whirling might be gratified without 
stint. It is not so much the long hours that are to be 
execrated — nobody works longer hours than myself — as 
the monotony of the labor to which these iron masters 
constrain them. One might even condone the monotony 



150 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

if the products were satisfactorily divided. But the poor 
remain poor and life becomes ugly even for the rich. Diis- 
seldorf, the birthplace of Heine, from his description of 
which I have just been quoting, once celebrated for its 
school of art, and boasting of scholars and philosophers, 
is now famous for its iron factories and its manufactures 
of explosives — a literal conversion to blood and iron. 1 

IV 

The cry to "organize," the slogan of "Efficiency" comes 
from every quarter of the horizon — we are ignorant and 
self-satisfied, says Sir Oliver Lodge, our governing classes, 
all classes. Our commercial men have neglected the ex- 
pert, says the Royal Society, and the War Office has neg- 
lected him even more fatally. The Empire is disorganized, 
disgraced by preventable poverty, says Mr. Hughes, the 
man from Australia. We need to borrow "the national 
self -discipline which lies behind the German Armies," says 
the Archbishop of York. It is all true — nostra culpa — 
abominably true; Lord Rosebery preached it long ago, even 
before Germany had in every sense shocked the four corners 
of the world in arms. Admiration for her (as Sir Max 
Wachter pointed out in the Fortnightly Review for May, 
1913) "was clearly apparent in Great Britain's desire to 
shape its administration, its education and its social legisla- 
tion on Germany's model." No wonder "Efficiency" now 
meets us everywhere like a patent medicine, and "Organi- 
zation" is replacing "Mesopotamia" as a blessed word. 

Nevertheless I continue to hold that we must fly from 

1 The reason Germans are disliked, according to Naumann, the author of 
Miitel-Europa, is because their State has arrived at the "second step" of 
transition from private Capitalism to Socialism in the sense of "a national 
order for the raising of the common produce of all for the use of all." 



THE MODEL MONSTER 151 

Germany's Efficiency and Organization as Mr. Poultney 
Bigelow tells us the cinnamon-colored children of her 
colonies fly from German education, shinning up the tallest 
trees. God would indeed "strafe" England if this is to be 
the outcome of our gigantic struggle for liberty; if we are 
to accept the ideal of making ourselves efficient fighting 
cocks — whether the fight be military or commercial — or 
of turning our State into that perfectly- working Diesel 
machine which Mr. Lloyd George so magnificently de- 
nounced at the beginning of the war. To any true civiliza- 
tion, Prussianism is as deadly as prussic acid. Abolish 
Greek in our universities if you will ; nay, replace it by chem- 
istry. But by chemistry as an intellectual interest, not 
as an aid to commercial competition. We cannot dispense 
with Tityrus, 

"PatulcB recubans sub tegmine fagi" 

even if he is meditating the chemistry of his oaten reed, 
instead of playing upon it. Germany is full of skilled 
technical experts with a university training. And they 
are ground down to the wages of clerks. In short — first 
catch your hare. Before you babble of "Organization" 
and "Efficiency" see that you have a civilization worth 
organizing, and an ideal that efficiency will not make 
still more monstrous. 

V 

Efficiency is but a means to an end, and if the end is 
unworthy, organization only increases the evil. Neither 
the rigid military religionism of the Junkers, though it has 
its beauty, nor the scientific industrialism of the com- 
mercial classes, though it has its necessity, nor the national- 
ization of education, though it has its nobility, is improved 
by the extreme to which it is pushed by a people of inexor- 



152 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

able and therefore imperfect logic. For life is crushed in 
these iron grooves. That which other peoples have held 
lightly and with a sense of the simultaneous pull of rival 
ideals and aspects Germany drives to a one-sided finality. 
As her philosophy has made of Darwinism an excuse for 
militarism, so her militarism shrinks from no brutality 
implicit in a syllogism, while a horde of poets and philoso- 
phers follow in the wake of her armies, ready to find a 
logical niche for any unforeseen barbarity and to cover even 
an accidental atrocity with a fine-sounding theory. 

Other peoples find military operations occasionally neces- 
sary, but Bismarck must declare "War is the natural con- 
dition of humanity," Moltke must make it a religion, Bern- 
hardi a biological necessity, and Treitschke a philosophy of 
history. Other peoples find it necessary to rely more on 
manufactures and less on agriculture, but for Germany this 
must be a Weltpolitik necessitating "places in the Sun" — 
market-places, ordinary mortals call them. Other peoples 
find it necessary to have ships, but "the future of Germany 
is on the water!" These poor Teutons can think only in 
terms of the State, in which they have merged their docile 
souls. 

VI 

Now every country is already sufficiently Prussian to be 
only saved by its inefficiency. Every country holds in solu- 
tion the elements that could be precipitated into a Prussia, 
mediaeval religionism, divine right of Kings (even Republics 
have always Pretenders latent) , fighting services and tradi- 
tions and illusions of the glory of conquest, grinding fac- 
tories, lust of world-trade and of new Afric markets, etc. 
As Burns almost wrote: — 

O wad some power gie us, brithers, 
To see ourselves as we see ithers. 



THE MODEL MONSTER 1 53 

Prussia is a distorting mirror in which we may see ourselves 
straightened out — our incoherence distorted into systematic 
rigidity. We may also see ourselves upside down, for Prussia 
stands upon its apex — Junkerdom and the Kaiser — instead 
of being "broad-based upon the people's will." The vision 
should be enough to keep us right side up. If Englishmen 
do not think at all, they at least escape the bad thinking of 
the Germans which, beginning on a wrong basis, gets 
steadily worse the more logical it is. With an illogical 
person two wrongs may always make a right, but your 
German never blunders back into sense. If, however, Eng- 
land is now strung up to thinking point, let her think out a 
better social order for organization than Prussia possesses. 
The real trouble with Prussian organization is not that it is 
efficient but that it is premature. The Englishman may be 
uneducated but the German is highly miseducated. That 
is, I take it, the answer to Sir Leo Chiozza Money, who 
could not understand why Mr. Sidney Webb's socialist 
organ The New Statesman should be so against Prussia, 
and conscription. But if Prussia's approach to State 
Socialism leaves even the Socialist cold, it is because Bis- 
marck stole Lassalle's clothes and put military buttons on 
them. National service with civil rights must form part 
of any rational social order, but when conscription came on 
us like a thief in the night, it combined the immaturity of 
Prussia with the inefficiency of England. Like the pessi- 
mist in the humorous definition, placed between two evils, 
we chose both. We want an efficient England, not an effi- 
cient Prussia. But an inefficient Prussia would be "pes- 
simism" indeed. 



SOME APOLOGISTS FOR GERMANY 

" He takes the part which he thinks most in need of his sup- 
port, not so much out of magnanimity, as to prevent too great a 
degree of presumption or self-complacency on the triumphant 
side." — Hazlitt. 



If I had not read The Fatherland every week and not been 
deluged with abusive letters from German-Americans, I 
should have been tempted to think there was something to 
be said for Germany. But the gross vulgarity and exaggera- 
tion of the pro-Germans of America, their rancorous mis- 
reading both of British history and their own President, 
contract the sympathies. I feel they would have a much 
better case if they would consent to be even a little in the 
wrong. Just as I feel my own admirable countrymen would 
occupy much firmer ground, if they would consent to tone 
down their saintliness and chivalry. The only hero — or 
heroine — of this epic is Belgium. She is the only figure 
sans peur et sans reproche. There was nothing heroic in our 
going to help her. True, we were not bound to help her — 
our guarantee was not unconditional — but if "a German 
Antwerp is a pistol pointed straight at England" Sancho 
Panza himself would have scarcely refrained from the ad- 
venture. Our generosity and loving kindness to her refugees 
went beyond the bounds of military necessity — we are 
entitled to plume ourselves on that. But to vaunt our 
honor in the business would be like bragging of our honesty 
because we had thwarted a shopkeeper's attempt to give 

IS4 



SOME APOLOGISTS FOR GERMANY 1 55 

us short change. Nobody now, however — except perhaps 
the Archbishop of Canterbury — represents us as fighting 
primarily for the sanctity of treaties. Even Mr. Garvin now 
admits that Colonel John Ward, M. P., went to the heart 
of the matter when he cried in the House: " Surely anyone 
can see that the battlefields of Flanders and France are as 
much our own battlefields as though the battles were being 
fought in our own villages." The soldier "shrivelled up 
sophistry" Mr. Garvin tells us. 1 I believe it is Mr. Shaw 
who claims to have shrivelled it up. But surely it was 
neither he nor the Colonel but that plain-dealer of politics, 
Mr. Bonar Law, who by offering Mr. Asquith his co-opera- 
tion even before Belgium was invaded, and by saying in 
the House immediately after she was invaded, that we owed 
Belgium a debt that we could never repay, surely it was he, 
who put the war on its true basis as the long-impending 
struggle between England and Germany. It has indeed 
been somewhat disconcerting to all of us, who have for years 
been thrilling with expectancy of this Titanic war for the 
world, to be fobbed off — when it did come — with talk about 
assassinated arch-dukes or violated treaties. In so elemental 
a contest for hegemony the pretext for hostilities is of only 
minor relevance, and there is even a sense in which neither 
side can be classed as "right" or "wrong." Kant somewhat 
ironically wonders that the word "right" has not been 
openly banished from politics as a pedantry. But surely 
the real distinction between England and Germany is not 
that one is "right" and the other "wrong" but that one is 
England and the other Germany and that it would be a 
sad day for the world if Germany triumphed. The victory 
of England is desirable — even for the outside world — not 
because she is "right" but because she is England, because 
she represents a freer and less selfish civilization. She may 

1 Observer, January 4, 1916. 



156 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

be no better than Germany in her lust of Empire, but once 
her rule is accepted, she will rule with justice, with sym- 
pathy, with generosity, and without crushing her subjects 
with her Kultur. Had Germany possessed the naval hegem- 
ony instead of England, there would have been no "free- 
dom of the seas" even in peace, but vexatious tariffs and 
closed areas. Wordsworth lamented of his country, 

" Oh, grief that earth's best hopes rest all with thee! " 

But at any rate they are earth's best hopes. Placed be- 
tween the German devil and the deep sea Britannia rules 
over, no sane person could hesitate to commit himself to 
the mercy of the waves. 

Which things being so, even Mr. Shaw's contention — in 
perhaps his finest piece of English — that the old British Hon 
seized the chance of making a spring at Germany when she 
had foolishly handicapped herself with two other antag- 
onists, would not put England in the wrong. She was merely 
following the maxim of Barney Barnato — "if you see an- 
other man about to hit you, you hit him first." 

II 

Still less sympathy have I with Mr. Shaw's pseudo- 
Prussian logic in acceptance of her " f rightfulness " as fair 
fighting, his professed inability to see why civilians who pay 
for the war should not suffer by it as much as combatants. 
No form of fighting is unfair, if fair warning has been given, 
but if the parties have bound themselves by the law of na- 
tions—such as it is — not to use this or that weapon or 
method, a breach of these conventions is treachery. Even 
so, you may play Association Football or "Rugger" but 
you cannot suddenly throw the ball you have agreed only 
to kick. At the Hague Peace Conferences of 1899 and 1907 



SOME APOLOGISTS FOR GERMANY 157 

Germany undertook a number of obligations — such as 
not to bombard undefended towns or to terrorize non- 
combatants — which she has drastically ignored. Indeed 
such breaches of faith are declared by Dr. von Campe to be 
wrong only in Civil Law, not in International Law. "A 
nation which against its vital interest would observe an 
international treaty would commit high treason against 
itself." The learned German jurist does not perceive that 
he has destroyed all possibility of that International Law 
of which he treats. His countryman Kant was more clear- 
sighted. For the sixth article of his Treaty for "Perpetual 
Peace," runs: 

"No State at war with another shall countenance such modes 
of hostility as would make mutual confidence impossible in a 
subsequent state of peace ; such are the employment of assassins 
(per cuss ores), breaches of capitulation, the instigation and 
making use of treachery (perduellio) in the hostile State." 

Even if it were true that humanity's demand for an interna- 
tional ethic protecting non-combatants and mitigating war 
is a logical absurdity, we ought not rudely to dispel a de- 
lusion which unlike so many of humanity's delusions makes 
for a better world. Life is psychological, not logical. But for 
once it is humanity and not Mr. Shaw, that is logical. The 
world was really not born yesterday, as some of our writers 
seem to think, and by its unfortunately long practice of war 
it has arrived at many a convention of which not necessity 
is the mother, but convenience. Non-combatants and 
women were to be sacred because they could be struck out 
from each side of the equation without affecting the mil- 
itary values. There have always been people who urged 
that the more frightful war was made, the less it would be 
practiced. But the more reasonable view has prevailed 
that since there always would be wars, they should be made 



158 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

as mild as possible. Hence did the mediaeval Church invent 
"the Truce of God" (denied to-day even on Christmas), 
hence did the "Decree of Eternal Pacification of 1495" 
abolish private war. Hence, after the brutal religious and 
civil wars of the sixteenth century which disgusted Ariosto, 
Rabelais and Montaigne, the attempt of Grotius in 1625 
and of Vattel in 1758 to humanize war and limit its effects 
on neutrals ; hence finally the Red Cross League and Hague 
Conventions. 

"I saw, says Grotius, in the whole Christian world a license 
of fighting at which even barbarians might blush, wars begun 
on trifling pretexts or none at all, and carried on without rever- 
ence for any divine or human law, as if that one declaration of 
war let loose every crime." 

But the laws that were to be silent during arms were, he 
protested, only the laws of civil life, not the laws of natural 
justice {dictata recta rationis). In his great work De Jure 
Belli et Pads, the Dutch jurist proceeded to lay down such 
natural laws; maintaining against his countryman, Eras- 
mus, that war thus honorably declared and bounded was 
not unchristian. It would be interesting to compare his 
rules with those of The Hague. Suffice it to say that he 
bans poison, or poisoned missiles, burning of the harvest, 
destruction of houses or works of art, plundering of churches, 
sinking of piratical ships containing innocent passengers, 
killing of the unarmed or the old or women and children, 
causing unnecessary loss of life, etc., etc. : indeed, all his laws 
might be summed up in the one that prohibits everything 
tending to prevent the resumption of friendly relations between 
the belligerents. A study of Grotius enables us to see more 
clearly how Germany has sinned against the light, and how 
much cultivated ground has been re-swamped by the Ger- 
man Ocean. 



SOME APOLOGISTS FOR GERMANY 159 

But it was not left to the year 1625 to humanize war. 
The doctrine of Clausewitz and Mr. Shaw that "war is the 
extreme form of violence" would have been repudiated by 
all the greatest spirits of antiquity — from Moses to Cicero 
and Seneca, from Plato to Plutarch. If fight we must, it 
is still men that are fighting, not fiends or beasts. 

"Our legislator," writes Josephus, defending the Jewish 
Kultur against Apion, 

"would have us treat those that are esteemed our enemies with 
moderation; for he doth not allow us to set their country on 
fire, nor permit us to cut down those trees that bear fruit ; nay, 
further, he forbids us to spoil those that have been slain in war. 
He hath also provided for such as are taken captive, that they 
may not be injured, and especially that the women may not 
be abused." 

And the customs Josephus was declaring at the end of the 
first century were already over a thousand years old. "Non- 
combatants to be spared," says Plato's Republic, "no houses 
to be burnt, no farms to be devastated, the dead to be hon- 
orably buried, no trophies of war to be placed in the 
temple of the gods." While thus from hoary antiquity, 
we find man laboring to minimize the bestiality of war, it 
was reserved for the remorseless logic of the Germans to say 
that since war is bestial, we must be as beastly as possible. 

Ill 

When, however, it is sought to soften our just fury 
against Germany by the plea that not all Germans are 
beasts, we enter upon more reasonable regions of contro- 
versy. There indeed we come upon Burke's immortal con- 
tribution to eirenics — that you cannot draw an indictment 
against a whole people. No less an anti-German than Mr. 



l6o THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

Lloyd George has said (I quote the report, grammar and 
all): 

"We are not fighting the German people. The German 
people are just as much under the heel of the Prussian military 
caste, and more so, thank God, than any other nation of Europe. 
It will be a day of rejoicing for the German peasant and artisan 
and trader, when the military caste is broken. (Cheers.)" 

That Mr. Lloyd George spoke truly, may be read clearly 
in a German letter written on July 28, 191 5, and vouched 
for by Dr. David Starr Jordan, Chancellor of Leland Stan- 
ford University, in which the Junker regards the war not 
only as a bid for the mastery of the world but as the salva- 
tion of his noble order from the stupid people {der dumme 
Michel) with its democratic and pacifist chimeras. Even 
without such testimony it was obvious that from the mili- 
tants we must deduct the millions of Social Democrats, 
who have only become militants in the actual crisis of 
war, and that against Bernhardi who is disavowed by the 
Intellectuals as practically unknown in Germany we must 
set such writers as Captain Persius, the well-known naval 
expert, who not three weeks before the war published in 
The Peace Movement, issued at Berne, a strong plea for 
Mr. Churchill's suggestion as to limitation of armaments, 
and was attacked in the Kreuz-zeitung of last December 
as the reputed author of Der Zusammenbruch, a work 
avowedly written to prove the suicidal results of a clash 
between the British and German fleets. The pacifist and 
anti-absolutist Jews of the Berliner Tageblatt, the journal 
to which Captain Persius is attached, occupy of course 
the same position. And before the war, evidences of the 
existence of a sane minority abounded on every hand. 
Thus the Frankfurter Zeitung of December 14th, 1913, 
contains a report of a speech delivered by Pastor Nithak- 



SOME APOLOGISTS FOR GERMANY l6l 

Stahn on "The Moral Code of Nations" repudiating the 
idea that this is not the same for all nations, asserting that 
each of them is but a branch on the great tree of hu- 
manity, and that to reach this common ideal we must 
overcome : 

" (i) The obsolete ideal of national arrogance, (2) The romance 
of war, the ideal of the beast of prey, not of man, (3) that 
nervous and immature sense of honor which is ever ready to 
unsheathe the sword." x 

The same Frankfort organ on December 19th rejoiced in 
the prospective Anglo-German understanding. In the 
Reichstag sitting of December 12th, Herr A. Alpers, the 
member for Hanover, exhorted opposition to any future 
armament bills and pointed to the readiness repeatedly 
shown by the British Government for mutual limitation 
of ships. And nobody in Europe has denounced armaments 
more fearlessly than the veteran Professor Brentano of 
Munich University. Even now, with war at full blaze, 
voices are raised against the mad militarist Kultur. Thus, 
according to the German papers, a great-grandson of 
Schiller, Baron von Gleichen, lecturing to an audience that 
filled the great hall of the Reichstag to its utmost capacity, 
derided the half-understood catchwords of the Kulturists 
and what Romain Rolland calls "the mobilization of the 
intellect for war." "Get real culture," he told them, "and 
you will get the brotherhood of the nations." 

Militarism in fact has never been without an opposition 
even in the palmy days directly after the Franco-Prussian 
war. From an address delivered at Munich in 1875 by the 
late Dr. Dollinger 2 we learn that there were then two par- 
ties in Germany — the one looking forward to its becoming 

1 Cited in War and Peace, January, 1914. 

2 Studies in European History. 



1 62 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

again, as from the tenth to the thirteenth century, the 
spiritual leader of the world, and the other predicting "the 
speedy downfall of the empire and the rushing in of chaos." 
Thus we see that when Germany was made over again in 
his own image by Bismarck, large sections escaped the 
hypnosis, and remain as a powerful nucleus for a modern 
State conception. 

IV 

Nor is it necessary to believe in all the atrocities or to be- 
lieve that the genuine ones represent more than a jackboot 
minority. Our own men have got out of hand, too, some- 
times. The early Christians and even the latter-day Jews 
have been accused of using human blood in their mysterious 
rites — hate is a marvellous myth-maker. In Serbia at least 
we know from Dr. Ella Scarlett-Synge that the Bavarian 
regiments behaved excellently, and the same pleader for 
fair play gives a certificate of decency to the German 
internment camps. A German officer's diary issued by 
the British Press Bureau in November, 1914, in evidence of 
the vandalism in Belgium, bears also proof that it was not 
abstract malevolence. Thus, under date August 23d, we 
read : — 

"Our men came back and said we could not get on any further 
as the villagers were shooting at us from every house. We shot 
the whole lot, 16 of them. The losses in our regiment (thirty 
killed and many wounded) were caused chiefly by villagers who 
shot at us from the houses. The men were absolutely mad at 
this sneaking way of fighting. They wanted to burn everything 
and they succeeded too in setting light to several houses." 

It is also asserted in a German volume on pictorial slanders 
that a picture of a pogrom that appeared in the German- 
Jewish magazine Ost Und West was passed off on, and by, 
Le Journal as an episode in Belgium. A child whose hands 



SOME APOLOGISTS FOR GERMANY 1 63 

were cut off figured in the martyrology but must have been 
carried off by the Russians who came to England via Arch- 
angel, for nobody has ever been able to produce her. As 
for the destruction of cathedrals I do not know that you 
can shell or bomb a town so accurately as to avoid them, 
and the sudden passion for mediaeval architecture among 
the Philistines of my acquaintance is not convincing. When 
I hear these plaints ad nauseam about the Cathedral of 
Rheims, I cannot help recalling a passage written by the 
poet of the Gothic Cathedral, Victor Hugo himself, who 
relates casually in his Choses Vues, how a month before 
the coronation of Charles X in this very Cathedral a swarm 
of masons with ladders and hammers occupied a complete 
week in breaking off every bit of projecting sculpture in 
the world-famous facade — for fear a piece of the stone- 
work might fall on the King's head. Their fragments 
encumbered the pavement and were swept away. "I long 
possessed a head of Christ fallen in this fashion," says 
Victor Hugo. 



A charwoman, working in the house of a Jewish friend 
of mine, startled him by remarking ''Jews is a bad lot." 
But, she added meditatively, "Christians is wuss." In 
so far as the apologists argue — with "Vernon Lee" — that 
at any rate Prussia is better than Russia, since whereas 
Social Democracy is proscribed in Russia, it is a great 
political party in Germany, with a popular press, few people 
except Mr. Wells will disagree. (Mr. Wells is, however, not 
wrong in relying upon the illogic and inefficiency of Russia, 
for Social Democrats may represent their party in the 
Duma, though they have to disappear as swiftly as possible 
into the recesses of Russia as soon as its dissolution removes 
their immunity.) But with all my respect for Mr. Morel I 



164 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

cannot follow him, when he tries to make out that Germany- 
is more sinned against than sinning. Under the title of 
Ten Years of Secret Diplomacy he has published a long 
cock-and-bull story (I refer merely to the Gallic cock and 
John Bull), showing that France and England were in 
collusion to keep Germany out of colonies, markets and 
places in the sun, and that when in 1906 the representatives 
of the Powers drew up the Act of Algeciras "in the name of 
God Almighty" to guarantee the independence, integrity 
and economic freedom of Morocco, a secret treaty was 
already in existence with the connivance of England, 
practically partitioning it between France and Spain — a 
partition since carried out. I will grant Mr. Morel that, 
so far as he deals with facts, his book is an excellent illustra- 
tion of "the levity of war-politics" and the tragi-comedy 
of diplomacy. I will even concede that such an impartial 
authority as Sir Harry Johnston confirms the tale of the 
constriction of German colonial expansion at every possible 
point, and the creation by France at least of protection- 
ist areas closed to her rival. In Sir Harry's article, The 
Problems of Germany, fortunately published before the war, 
we were warned that Germany "must break out some- 
where" for her view that England's veto lay across her 
path, though distorted, was mainly right: 

"England who at conferences and by treaties and under- 
standings was willing to agree to Belgium, the United States, 
Spain, France, Russia, Portugal, Greece, Bulgaria, getting, 
annexing, occupying something, but never Germany or Austria, 
except with a tremendous outcry and veiled threats of war, . . . 
Germany winces yet from the sermons in the British press when- 
ever she has hungered after a naval station at Trieste, a port 
on the Euphrates Delta, or a Pacific island. And even while 
such sermons are being written the Anglo-Saxon mouth opens 
and englobes the Malay provinces of the Kingdom of Siam. . . . 



SOME APOLOGISTS FOR GERMANY 1 65 

Yet more than ever Germany was in need of an outlet for her 
enormously developed industries. She wanted — as also Austria 
— lands in which vast quantities of raw products could be found 
or grown — especially cotton, iron, and coal — and to which 
manufactures could be sent. And, further, there was that 
vaguely denned desire which comes to all successful peoples — 
the wish to extend the home empire over other kingdoms, to 
subjugate, control, educate other peoples. Where could Ger- 
many look to found such an empire if she did not strike soon?" 

In the same vein Mr. J. A. Hobson writes 1 that "the 
present war is in the main a product of these economic 
antagonisms," especially "the close protection of the French 
colonial system, recently and in defiance of treaty rights 
extended to Morocco, " and supplemented by the fear that 
Great Britian would abandon Free Trade. And he cites 
the Belgian economist, Henri Lambert, to show Germany's 
apprehension of being left out in the cold — Germany with 
a growing population of seventy millions and only one- 
tenth of the territory possessed by Britain; menaced more- 
over by Russia's threat of serious modifications of her 
present commercial treaty with Germany when it expired 
in 1916. 

VI 

I have given the full strength of the Morel case — and 
even bolstered it up by quotations from Sir Harry Johnston 
who is now all for dismembering and despoiling Germany. 
And I have done so, because it is, as the Ibsen lady said of 
literature, "irrelevant." The world had passed beyond 
"ordeal by battle." Europe had moved on: cruel, satanic 
even, as Mr. Morel had shown it could be to colored and 
inferior races, the great advance in means of communica- 
tion was unifying it, internationalizing it. The fact that 
1 Towards International Government. 



1 66 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

Germany was born too late for her fair share in the spoils 
of other continents, that the best parts of the globe were 
staked out, was not — in the phrase of her own Leibnitz — a 
"sufficient reason" for setting the world ablaze. If by the 
filibustering code by which past empires have been won, 
Germany was theoretically entitled to hew out an empire 
in her turn, it is precisely her application of this code that 
constitutes her treason against humanity. For it was a 
code outworn and obsolescent, that even in its prime had 
never been accepted consciously and in all its logical impli- 
cations. The British Empire of which Germany was so 
jealous was only a nominal empire. It had grown up with- 
out design, through individual activities, trading companies, 
and historical accidents. It had no cohesion, no protective 
tariffs. The seas were free. Germany was welcome to all 
the trade she could do, and economists say that with Canada 
she was actually doing twice the trade that England was. 
It is Germany that now bids fair to make a real British 
Empire, as Napoleon made the German Empire. 

It is true, France tried to Frenchify trade, but France 
would have crumbled before Germany by the mere decay of 
her population. There was no reason whatever for the 
arbitrament of War; the pen of the German clerk was 
mightier than the sword. If England unduly favored 
France it was in sheer terror of the blonde beast, who, even 
if he had a good case before the war, has retrospectively 
spoiled it by a display of strength and of savagery that 
shows how justified this apprehension is. The course of the 
war has vindicated the assertion of Professor Usher in his 
book on "Pan Germanism" that "the Germans aim at 
nothing less than the domination of Europe and the world 
by the Germanic race." It is certainly no negligible ob- 
server who informed us before the war that "the Germans 
consider perfectly feasible the construction of a great con- 



SOME APOLOGISTS FOR GERMANY 1 67 

federation of States including Germany, Austria, Hungary, 
the Balkan States and Turkey, which would control a great 
band of territory stretching south-east from the North Sea 
to the Persian Gulf." 

It is urged that Germany needed either colonies to re- 
ceive her surplus population or a great new market to give 
them employment at home. I deny both alternatives. 
When Germany says "I must live," I agree cheerfully, 
but when she says, "I must live outside Europe," I reply: 
"Je n'en vois pas la necessite." Such colonies as were open 
to her to administer as German colonies were incapable of 
sustaining white populations, and in point of fact her 
emigration had ceased of late, owing to the improvement 
of the homeland. If it is said that nevertheless a point of 
saturation would ultimately be reached and she must then 
either have the new market, or else see her sons absorbed 
by non-German-Americas, my answer is, that this is the 
best possible fate for them. Why having attained a popu- 
lation of nearly seventy millions should not Germany be 
satisfied to maintain it at this and let the others form part 
of new geographical and political creations? Seventy 
millions are enough to preserve Germanismus in all its 
greatness (not to mention the millions of Austria) — why 
this bloodthirsty clinging to every German? Let this 
blood — if it is so marvellous — blend with and improve 
the blood of the world under other constellations. The 
new world is a melting pot, not a preserving pot. A redu- 
p] icated Europe would be a bore. "The old order change th, 
yielding place to the new," and the German may well be as 
content as God to fulfil himself in many ways. 

The friends of Germany will answer, "This is all very 
fine philosophy! But coming from England, it is her 
customary British cant. What of her Canada, her Aus- 
tralia, her New Zealand? She can conserve her race even 



1 68 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

in emigration." But here again the shadow is taken for 
substance. In the first place half of England's emigrants 
go to the United States. In the second place myriads of 
Germans go to Canada. The notion that Canada can be 
kept English (apart from a great province being already 
French) is a British illusion. I do not even say with Gold- 
win Smith it will join the United States — Germany by her 
war has stopped that for a long time if not for all time — but 
will be a United States — a Melting Pot of every people 
under the sun, and even its English institutions will not 
prevent the rise of a new political entity with a psychology 
of its own. The same with Australia. The idea that the 
British Empire can be populated with the surplus popula- 
tion of two little islands with a falling birth-rate still further 
reduced by the war, is a fallacy more than once dealt 
with in this book. 

VII 

As for the desire "which comes to all successful peoples — 
the wish to extend the home empire over other kingdoms, to 
subjugate, control, educate other peoples " — that is the most 
pernicious of all. What England did by genius Germany 
wishes to do by consciousness and talent. But genius, de- 
spite the pro-German Carlyle and his Goethe, is not an infi- 
nite capacity for taking pains. It is all very earnest and 
touching, this devotion to Deutschland ueber Alles, but you 
cannot by taking thought add a foot to your stature, you 
cannot get by cunning what England got by luck, you can- 
not turn back the stream of history. Moreover, just when 
John Bull was beginning to discover that Empire in the Ger- 
man sense was a mistake, that intensive imperialism or the 
perfection of the homeland was the true ideal, just as he 
was trying by the door of self-government to back out of 
India, into which he had blundered, lo! the German comes 



SOME APOLOGISTS FOR GERMANY 1 69 

along with all the vulgarity of a parvenu coveting and 
aping the life whose finer principle he misses, glorifying 
Empire like a pirate King, commercializing it like a trades- 
man and steeling himself by a pseudo-philosophy to justify 
the crimes we had begun to repent of. And the irony of 
the situation is that we hear ourselves summoned to follow 
this gross refraction of our ideal and to begin copying our 
own caricature. 

This is why, much as I sympathize with Mr. Morel's 
campaign against secret diplomacy, I cannot follow him 
in his vindication of Germany. In the Congo business 
Mr. Morel had to deal only with crude facts whose face- 
value was their all-in-all : here he has to deal with complexi- 
ties and world-currents and historic phenomena, and his 
timeless abstract standards of equity cannot be applied 
to England, France and Germany as though these were 
the E, F, G of a mathematical proposition, and not nations 
with immensely varying histories, temperaments, ideals, 
and ambitions. His notion that E, F, G were equal en- 
tities, entitled to an equal share in the partition of the 
backward regions of the earth, is a mere piece of ideology. 
G by her refusal to limit armaments had already imposed 
an intolerable burden on E and F, which would alone have 
justified them in opening up new sources of revenue to her 
disadvantage. She meant to use every new territorial 
gain as a fulcrum for world-power and her world-power, 
unlike E's, would have been a grinding tyranny. Dis- 
honorable as was the partition of Morocco, there was at 
least no danger in F being there. Would it have been 
equally safe to enthrone G opposite Gibraltar? If I took 
a knife from a madman, would Mr. Morel say I was a 
thief? Let Mr. Morel read the recent tribute to Von Hin- 
denburg by the chief of his staff, if he still fails to under- 
stand how German ambition has ruined our generation. 



THE KAISER AT THE JUDGMENT BAR 

"For in those days might only shall be admired 
And valor and heroic virtue called; 
To overcome in battle, and subdue 
Nations, and bring home spoils with infinite 
Man-slaughter, shall be held the highest pitch 
Of human glory, and for glory done 
Of triumph, to be styled great conquerors, 
Patrons of mankind, Gods and sons of Gods, 
Destroyers rightlier call'd and plagues of men." — Paradise Lost. 

" A fav'rite has no friend." — Gray. 

Mediaeval art has familiarized us ad nauseam with Heaven 
and Hell. In mosaic and enamel, in fresco and bronze, 
in marble and jewel-work, majestic on canvas or minute 
in missal, the same picture perpetually assails us — the 
Judge super-dominant in the centre, the rising dead at 
his feet, the saints on his right hand, smug and symmetrical 
in their haloes, the sinners on his left en route for the torture 
chamber below. 



This conception of the Last Judgment is for us moderns 
dead — killed by our sense of justice. A brave attempt to 
replace it by a better has just been made by "A Humble 
Clerk" in a book called The Grand Assize, which in a more 
sensible world than ours would at once have been adopted 
as a Sunday school prize. The ethical basis of this new 
"Last Judgment" is that "anyone who looks into his own 
nature must feel his brotherhood with all who have been 
found out." Divine punishment, not calculated to re- 

170 



THE KAISER AT THE JUDGMENT BAR 171 

generate this nature by suppressing the evil germs and 
developing the good, is merely a barbarous futility. The 
Judge is therefore no aloof avenger, but a friend and brother; 
no prisoner is brought to the bar unless he is so self-satisfied 
that the leaven of better impulses is not working of itself, 
nor is he then accused except by himself. The only Advo- 
cate who appears is briefed for his side, and the Judge, 
all love and pity, sums up and delivers a sentence whose 
purpose is purification. 

Before this bar "our humble clerk" arraigns the leading 
types of our day, from the Plutocrat to the Derelict, from 
the Actor to the Daughter of Joy, from Mrs. Grundy to the 
Party Politician, and to create all these so various trials 
obviously requires no small knowledge of the world and 
the human heart. One suspects that the author is that 
rara avis, a priest to whom religion is a call as well as a 
calling, and who has a touch of the spiritual genius as well 
as the humility of St. Francis. Where, unless weary world- 
lings had poured out to him their egotistic troubles, could 
he have gained this uncanny insight into the windings 
of their ways and the labyrinths of their hearts? Especially 
is this borne in upon us when such a figure as "The Actor" 
appears before the Divine tribunal— and misses his audience 
badly! Since Browning vivisected Bishop Blougram there 
has been no such incisive yet pitiful study of a complex 
modern temperament. Indeed, we find Browning's Bishop 
uttering the very core of the new gospel— 

"No, when the fight begins within himself, 
A man's worth something ..." 

II 

The problem of "The Grand Assize" is thus threefold. 
First, to set out Everyman's spiritual failure as he sees it 



172 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

in his own heart, despite the outer gauds of success; secondly 
— since Everyman is good as well as bad — to say all that 
can be said in his favor, and finally to discover a way out 
for the soul through its tangle of evil. The Plutocrat, for 
example, who has risen to riches on the ruins of a thousand 
lives, has yet benefited industry and art, and been unhappy 
in his home life, and by his damnation to a life of poverty 
is to have the chance of winning his way back to the human 
brotherhood. It is a method which may be fruitfully ap- 
plied in all directions, and it is not surprising that the author 
applies it to the Kaiser. 

Nor is it surprising that under this method the Kaiser 
is far from appearing the vulgar ogre of the British car- 
toonist, though there is humor enough in the figure he 
presents before the Judge — whom he salutes as an equal, 
and before whom, " being hopelessly mechanical," he be- 
haves "as at a court-martial." Nevertheless, I am afraid 
that in this one instance the charity of even our new St. 
Francis has failed before his patriotism, and that he has 
not sought so eagerly, as with his other occupants of the 
dock, to furnish the Advocate with an extenuating plea. 
Even the Judge betrays for once a British bias, and his 
judgment has the severity of Draco rather than the com- 
passionateness of Christ. It is true the Kaiser is not to be 
put into a cage, as the British workman demands, but it 
jars one's sense of the judicial, not to mention the god-like, 
to find the Judge telling him "Only by appealing to the 
brute in man did you gain your empire over the masses." 

Ill 

The case against the Kaiser is surely dark enough — the 
childish passion for soldiers, the mail-cart fist, the mega- 
lomania, the vanity of a Jack-of-all-arts, the epileptic out- 



THE KAISER AT THE JUDGMENT BAR 1 73 

bursts of rage, the reactionary medievalism with its Tor- 
quemada-like ruthlessness — to be in no need of British 
blacking. And, on the other hand, the Advocate would 
surely find ample material for the other side of the balance- 
sheet. He would plead that not by appealing to the brute 
in man but to the soul in man had the Kaiser gained his 
empire over the masses: by giving his subjects a shining 
example of labor and prayer and purpose. "While other 
Kings," he would say, "have been sunk in debauchery, 
his life has been a model of domesticity and temperance; 
while others have given laws only to fashion and folly, he 
has infused, his ideals even into his school-children's copy- 
books; while other Courts have reeked with inanity, he has 
chosen for companions the leaders of thought and life, so 
that in his kingdom science and literature were honored as 
jockeys and play-actors elsewhere; he has studied at first- 
hand all European problems, and while the majority of rulers 
must rely upon an Aaron for their language, he has crystal- 
lized his thoughts with such epigrammatic eloquence that 
they have turned into proverbs. For a generation he has 
kept the peace in face of the most militarist gang in Europe, 
and his resolute patience was only sapped by their arro- 
gance. As a youth he had the courage to oust Bismarck: 
as a man he has not recoiled before even a world in arms. 
And if, my lord, he feels himself your favorite, that I sub- 
mit is only what some of the greatest figures in history 
have felt, from David your Psalmist to the British Crom- 
well. It is only an excess of their virtue — the virtue of 
faith." 

IV 

Hearing which, the Judge would — I imagine — wind up: 
"Your punishment, prisoner at the bar, shall be to be born 
again, but of Belgian refugees in poverty, and a modern 



174 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

man of genius instead of a mediaeval man of talent. Hence, 
what you shall strive for shall be Brotherhood, not Empire, 
and in place of a world of flatterers and parasites to magnify 
each mediocre gift, there shall be round you a world of 
enemies and disbelievers to depreciate, flout and deny you. 
Instead of the crown of sovereignty you shall wear the 
crown of thorns. You shall know no glory of triumph 
but only the tragedy of laboring in the darkness for a cause 
that shall seem hopeless, till at last, fainting and heart-sick 
at the sight of cities desolated and homes death-stricken, 
and millions of men turned into manure-heaps, you shall 
cry out: 'My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?' 
And in that moment perchance through the great blackness 
you shall see the glimmer of light." 



THE WAR AND THE DRAMA 

Destinie this huge chaos turmoyling." — Edmund Spencer. 



That the drama has ceased to hold the mirror up to 
nature or to uplift our age by its art, is a proposition urged 
with increasing frequency and uneasiness. The war, with 
its great moral issues and its high fate-driven personalities, 
has deepened this sense of a wasted or perverted instru- 
ment. The war has provided the themes, urges M. Victor 
Giraud, the editor of the Revue des Deux Mondes, it only 
remains for writers to find a modern framework for a drama 
which shall be to our generation what the classic drama was 
to our forefathers. 

Nearly twenty years before the war we find Maeterlinck 
defining the same want. "When I go to the theatre," he 
said in his essay, Le Tragique Quotidien, "it seems to 
me that I am passing some hours with my ancestors." 
Dramatists, he explained, continued to draw their inspira- 
tion from violence, whereas "the greater part of our lives 
passes far from blood and cries and swords. Our tears have 
become silent, invisible, almost spiritual." Hence the 
"material sublime" had ceased to appeal. "Violated vir- 
gins and imprisoned citizens" were but the outworn motifs 
of the obsolescent theatre of "blood, external tears and 
death." The Sage sitting by his lamp, a hand opening 
or closing a door, a ray of light through a casement, a 
shadow on a blind — such were the only legitimate effects 
open to the modern dramatist, if his color-scale was to be 

175 



176 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

as subdued and subtle as life's. And in 1904, in Le Drame 
Modcrnc, our poet noted with satisfaction that this inter- 
nalization of the drama was duly proceeding in Bjornson, 
Hauptmann, and especially Ibsen, and he looked forward 
to a still more pacific theatre, our clearer conscience and 
broader love eliminating many even of the spiritual con- 
flicts on which the older drama hinged. In the end the 
modern theatre might be "a theatre of peace, of beauty 
without tears." 

One has only to turn to Maeterlinck's latest utterance, 
The Hour of Destiny — to see how grimly life has taught 
him to contradict himself. His cry now is of "ruins and 
sacrifices, nameless tortures and numberless dead," and 
we are enjoined to destroy "root and branch," and "even 
against our own sense of pity and generosity" — as ruth- 
lessly as Samuel hewed Agag in pieces before the Lord — 
an enemy who is "in secret alliance with the evil influences 
of the earth." For Maeterlinck is a Belgian — and no 
longer a Belgian Shakespeare or a Belgian mystic, brood- 
ing on "The Treasure of the Humble," but a Belgian 
Avenger of Blood. 

II 

Among our dramatic critics — drawn for the most part 
from the genteel circles of a sophisticated and pacific 
civilization — a similar reaction against violence had taken 
place, if without the Maeterlinckian profundity. They 
had seen the drama become — in the Robertsonian theatre — 
a storm in a teacup. They had seen the disappearance of 
the robustious actor and the growth of the natural, if not 
always audible, jeune premier. They had believed — with 
that admirable light comedian, Mr. Charles Hawtrey — 
that the day of the high tragedian is over, though he might 
linger on in those occasional galvanizations of Shakespeare 



THE WAR AND THE DRAMA 1 77 

which piety for the dead classics would continue to inspire. 
But, in truth, Shakespeare seemed as barbarous to them as 
he had seemed to Voltaire. Ignorant of life, all the flam- 
boyance of passion and color, all the odd gleams of purity 
and beauty, all the pathos and grotesquerie that challenge 
the artist's eye from Clapham to Martaban, had ceased 
to exist for them when these things went out of fashion on 
the stage. All characters not common as City clerks were 
improbable; sentiments not expressed currently in drawing- 
rooms were fustian. They recognized comedy by soda-water 
syphons and cigarettes, and melodrama by pistols. That 
pistols might consist with comedy, or cigarettes with tragedy 
— even blank verse tragedy — they could not conceive. 

The war must change all that. It has demonstrated that, 
far from growing more inward, life is more crudely ex- 
ternal than ever. It is still heroic and vulgar in the gran- 
diose old fashion. There are soldiers, not chocolate, but 
iron, there are traitors and bullies. There are clamorous 
and riotous crowds that pillage and run amok, there are 
love-makings and clownings under the shadow of death, 
there are monstrous coincidences, impudently improbable. 
It is, in fact, melodrama that stands vindicated, if not in 
its method, at least in its material. Even the spy does, 
it appears, really exist, though he is revealed — in the 
German variety — rather as a great soldier-soul and martyr 
than as the comic Judas of our theatres. And after the 
revelation of Germany's scientific ruthlessness and im- 
perial ambitions we can no longer scoff — like Shakespeare 
and the Elizabethan critics — at Marlowe's picture of 
"Tamburlaine the Great," 

"He that calls himself the scourge of Jove, 
The Emperor of the world and earthly God." 

Even the " swank " of Tamburlaine's chariot drawn by bitted 
and bridled kings has a cartoon-truth, if not a literal truth. 



178 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

III 

And with the vindication of melodrama goes the vindica- 
tion of high tragedy — indeed, Greek tragedy was literally 
melodrama. High tragedy we thought high-falutin. We 
had not, we moderns, sentiments of such an amplitude. 
As for verse, who spoke it? The newspaper — and newspaper 
prose — that was modern life. Yet suddenly we have seen 
every newspaper bursting out into poetry — and quite 
shamelessly and daily, as though, under the pressure and 
urge of national emotion, verse was actually the natural 
language of speech. I remember at the first night of Leng- 
yel's study of the Japanese "Typhoon" — a production 
we owe to the artistic passion of the ill-fated Laurence 
Irving — the amazement of critics and audience alike at 
the self-immolating patriotism of the little yellow men, 
at the utter absorption of the individual life in the service 
of the State, a sacrifice carried on as continuously and un- 
falteringly in periods of peace as in the heats of war. That 
the germs of patriotic abnegation existed in England too, 
and might be developed to equal intensity at a certain 
temperature, was unknown, or rather forgotten. And, 
because it was forgotten, patriotism was relegated to melo- 
drama and the music-halls. It was the last refuge, not of 
a scoundrel, but of a comic singer. To have rendered it 
in the key of high art would have confused the critics and 
closed the box-office. Tragedy was equally taboo. 1 I 

1 A soldier back from the front, who signs himself "Wounded," laments in 
a letter to the Times of December 6, 1915: "The general rottenness of 
taste and feeling in a country which can amuse itself with ' Charlie Chaplin ' 
in days like these. Those of us who got home wounded had our depression 
confirmed." 

On the general fatuity of our stage of which the latest example is a "Dis- 
raeli" up-to-date, pro-Russian and anti-Turkish, my wise woman writes to 
me: "Our London stage has been ruined by London ' Society ' — a silly out-of- 



THE WAR AND THE DRAMA 1 79 

imagine that the typical producer of his day, Charles 
Frohman, never produced an "unhappy ending," never 
allowed his dramatists to suggest that a beloved and blame- 
less person might be crushed mercilessly between two 
giant forces at clash. Yet this "unhappy ending" has 
proved far less depressing than many a Frohman comedy. 
In no Frohman comedy shall you find a curtain-tag as 
beautiful and exalting as his own last speech: "Why fear 
death? It is life's finest adventure." That, spoken not in 
the academic armchair, but in the Lusitania, settling down 
to her doom, will forever cling round his memory like an 
aureole of light. It is the great, the Plutarchian word. 
Before I knew of it, my mind kept going back on our 
talks, seeing him — as he sat at his favorite view over the 
Thames — overbrooded as in a Maeterlinck play by a pall 
of destiny, that made his unconscious sunniness and op- 
timism only the more tragic. But now, by his great last 
word, he has dispelled the pall and has fixed an image of 
himself more radiant and lovable than ever. He stands, 
as it were, tiptoeing into the unknown, welcoming the last 
great adventure, so that 

" Eternal sunshine gathers round his head." 

date sort of business. 'Society' in that sense reached its zenith during the 
culmination of the 'Ancien Regime' which gave its great Drama to France; 
and English ' Society ' has been a sort of pale imitation of it, very expensive 
and giving no adequate return either in enjoyment or direction to the nation 
which supports it. The tragedy of the Nineteenth Century is 'missed 
opportunities.' The Drama has been suffocated by the unintelligent in- 
heritors of wealth and their associates; almost the only good plays I have 
seen are the cynical ones, 'The Importance of Being Earnest,' 'The Return 
of the Prodigal,' and both their authors succumbed to the unhealthy social 
atmosphere; they were 'gassed' by it. Modern conditions make the theatre 
and the newspaper such expensive things to run that money has shed its 
curse over both of them. Yet there are lots of talent, good will and generosity 
amongst us and we could provide very appreciative audiences if we could 
afford to pay for our seats." 



l8o THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

If only he had had the courage to put his own larger self 
on the stage! 

But, alas! the Stage Society — free from the commercial 
conditions that hem the managers and actor-managers — 
has none the more ventured to present life at its true height 
or depth. It has only replaced the "happy ending" by 
the ugly ending. As if to be unpleasant — the phrase is 
actually flaunted by Bernard Shaw — sufficed to create 
art! The Stage Society, though it has some original plays 
to its credit, has done nothing to win back the lost prov- 
ince of poetry; indeed, its members seem to have flat- 
tered themselves they were "seeing life," much as the night- 
bird imagines he is seeing it. 

IV 

The passing of the high tragedian — so cheerfully re- 
corded by Mr. Charles Hawtrey — meant the loss of the 
drama's highest organ — poetic tragedy— and with it a 
shrinking of human values. That sense of the greatness 
of human life, which the most ranting Shakespearean actor 
conveyed, which the veriest barn-stormer adumbrated, 
which lingered like the echoes of thunder even in the 
tragedies of Sheridan Knowles, had vanished from our 
post-prandial theatre. No wonder that the Germans 
(whose artisan class in the very stress of Armageddon built 
for itself a great classic theater) considered Shakespeare 
theirs, and the Englishman a "slacker." 1 There is a 

1 "Speaking in the Prussian Diet last Thursday, Herr Von Loebel, the 
Minister of the Interior, said that all plays which had been passed by the 
Censorship before the war had been reconsidered upon the principle that the 
programmes must now have 'a serious moral basis.' Between August i, 
1014, and the end of 1015, eighty-one plays were forbidden in Berlin alone." 
(Times, March, 1916.) 

"The programme for the theatrical week in Berlin ending January 17 



THE WAR AND THE DRAMA l8l 

subtle relation between all a nation's activities, and in 
an age when war is far more science and organization than 
brute courage, the British cult of brainlessness on the stage 
could not but be a sinister index of military laches. And 
if our working classes rose so slowly to the conception of 
national sacrifice, may it not be because no effort had been 
made to use the theatre to cultivate those ideals and im- 
pulses, the traditional channel for which their estrange- 
ment from the Church had choked up? I do not mean that 
the theatre should have appealed for recruits or for more 
devotion in the munition workers, but that it should have 
fostered that habit of mind and fineness of temper which 
would have made such appeals superfluous. What we need 
from our stage is a drama that helps us to move habitually 
on the high plane to which we are roused by the death and 

presents some interesting features, and offers a striking contrast to the 
theatrical fare of London in the same period. To begin with, there are 
two large houses in which first-class opera is performed every night, and 
two others in which music of a lighter character may be heard. Among the 
operas are 'Tannhauser,' 'The Flying Dutchman,' 'Siegfried,' 'Lohen- 
grin,' 'Hoffmann's Tales,' 'Rigoletto,' 'The Marriage of Figaro,' Weber's 
'Freischiitz,' 'La Traviata.' In three theatres we have plays by Shake- 
speare: 'Hamlet' (in two houses), 'Twelfth Night,' 'Julius Caesar,' 'The 
Comedy of Errors,' and 'Midsummer Night's Dream.' Schiller's plays, 
with their historical and patriotic teaching, are greatly in evidence: 'Die 
Jungfrau von Orleans,' 'Maria Stuart,' 'Wallenstein's Tod,' Goethe's 
'Faust' (first and second parts), and 'Gotz von Berlichingen' are being 
performed in two houses. Ibsen seems in great demand, especially his 
'Rosmersholm,' and well known and popular dramatists like Gustav 
Freitag, Hauptmann, and Sudermann figure largely on the list. Looking at 
the programmes of the ten best theatres in Berlin for the seven days, between 
January 9 and January 17, we have forty-five different plays and operas, 
not one of which is not a great dramatic or musical possession, not only 
of Germany but of the world." (Daily Chronicle, January 13, 1916.) 

About the same period the same organ said of a new revue at the Em- 
pire: "A newcomer is Miss , who disrobes by degrees, with a 

naive insouciance rare even at that historic house." It is only fair to add, 
however, that the Tageszeitung bemoans the impotence of decent Germans 
in their efforts to get a pure stage. 



182 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

heroism of our soldiers and our sons, by the agony and as- 
piration of our country. A nation that never breathes the 
mountain air of high art, nor ever takes the sacrament of 
poetry in common, is not likely to sustain itself long in the 
rarefied and glacial air of sacrifice. A nation whose greatest 
actors are drawn off to the music-halls is not likely to dis- 
entangle itself from commercialism when the hour for 
heroism strikes; a nation that feeds its spiritual fires upon 
the slag and ashes of dead formulae is not likely to burn 
with a clear flame. 



In what form, however, can M. Victor Giraud's demand 
for a drama suitable to our own age be satisfied? The old 
classic drama of every country had — as Maeterlinck has 
pointed out in a preface to Mr. Sutro's play, "The Cave of 
Illusion" — a background of supernatural powers who lent 
to the action the necessary depth, mystery and grandeur. 
This background, blotted out or at least befogged by 
modern conceptions, must — he urges— be restored in some 
form or other, if our drama is to be raised to the atmosphere 
of "Hamlet," "CEdipus" or "Antigone." Such atmos- 
phere as Ibsen achieves in his social dramas Maeterlinck 
believes to be merely unhealthy and unbreathable. 

It is true, of course, that we are at a transitional moment 
in which neither Jove nor Jehovah, neither the Furies nor 
the Fiends, neither the ghost in "Hamlet" nor the witches 
in "Macbeth" correspond to our sense of the vast mys- 
terious forces beyond and around our little life. And this 
uncertainty is accentuated by the war and finds expression 
in the candid and naive confession of many unphilosophical 
people that they are waiting to see by its issue whether there 
is a God or not. In such a period the hack dramatist, 
shrinking from the ancient supernatural background, and 



THE WAR AND THE DRAMA 1 83 

having no substitute in a personal sense of the universe, 
produces not art at all but photography. Our stage figures 
have the sharp-cut shallow objectivity of cardboard char- 
acters in a toy theatre or the Indians and cowboys of the 
cinematograph. But if this war, with all its world-tragedy 
and epical happenings, does not suggest to us a modern 
handling of the drama, or something nobler than the glorifi- 
cation of the Briton who stays at home to outwit German 
spies by his superior brain-power, we may well agree with 
our admirable light comedian that upon the high tragedian 
the curtain has been rung down. 

Not that this nobler drama is half so necessary to-day — 
when life itself is exalting enough — as it was in the piping 
times of peace. 1 

1 A letter written by me to the Pall Mall Gazette in March, 1913, on 
"Theatre Abstainers" shows how the masses of English people are left even 
in normal times without uplifting influences whether artistic or spiritual. 

"Sir, — Last week you quoted the Church Times as saying 'there are more 
people who object to the theatre altogether than there were in the drab 
days of the Victorian era.' In the spirit of Oliver Twist, I immediately 
purchased the paper, and was duly edified to read that the event of the 
season was 'Joseph and His Brethren' — a purely pagan play — while 'The 
Doctor's Dilemma' — an amoral exposition of the artist — came as a special 
delight to those who had been shocked by 'Androcles and the Lion' — a 
Christian mystery-play. 

"But what startled me most was the heading: 'The Drama — Retrospect.' 
Of course, I soon realized that Lent was full stop to the theatrical period of 
the Church, but I am left wondering how absence of art promotes spiritual 
purification. 

"Do the pious take down their pictures in Lent, I wonder, or cease to 
read Wordsworth and Shakespeare? And does the old self-denying ordi- 
nance apply to the new cinema? May they witness ' Shakespeare's Immortal 
Tragedy ' — as the cinema posters advertise ' Hamlet ' — if the play is purged 
of words? May they have ' Hamlet ' without the prince of poets? 

"But these abstainers are, after all, temporary. The seriousness of the 
situation lies in the almost total separation between the Puritan classes 
and the Stage. Nor, in an era of pyjama plays, can one say the Church 
Times is unjustified in warning us that the family party is being driven 
more and more from the theatre. 

"A generation may arise that knows not even 'Joseph.' But this is all 



184 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

To-day a theatrical form of "Tipperary" may be even 
more needful as a relaxation from the over-stimulus. Nor 
is it necessary that even of the nobler drama the theme 
should be the war. Topical art is a dubious and dangerous 
province. "We do not find," wrote Matthew Arnold, "that 
'The Persae' occupied a particularly high rank among the 
dramas of ^Eschylus because it represented a matter of 
contemporary interest. . . . The Greeks felt, no doubt, 
with their exquisite sagacity of taste, that an action of 
present times was too near them, too much mixed up with 
what was accidental and passing to form a sufficiently 
grand, detached and self-subsistent object for a tragic 
poem." 

Nevertheless, topical art with all its dangers is not to 
be banished, and if ^Eschylus, in 472 B. C, could dram- 
atize the battle of Salamis and the defeat which the Greek 
navies had inflicted on Xerxes in only 480 B. C., there 
is no aesthetic reason why a modern poet should not dram- 
atize Armageddon as precipitately as Mr. Stephen Phillips. 
True that by this hasty seizure of current matter the poet 
loses the immense co-operation of the mytho-poetic instinct 
which shapes and selects the story, and of time, which 
invests it with glamour. But the Greeks put so much stress 

the more reason why the Church should rally to the higher drama, and 
even throw over its old-fashioned notion that literature and Lent are in- 
compatible. For if there are plays that would profane Bank Holiday, there 
are plays that would hallow Good Friday — 'The Passing of the Third Floor 
Back' or 'The Showing Up of Blanco Posnet,' for example. 

"But if the dramatist and his work are left temporarily or totally out- 
side the Church consciousness, in what case is the Church itself? Why, 
according to the Times advertisement of the Scripture Readers' Association, 
and the authority of Sir Charles Booth, 'the great masses of the people 
remain apart from all forms of religious communion.' Thus the total ab- 
stainers from the Theatre are paralleled and even outnumbered by the 
total abstainers from the Church. For the majority of the nation, then, 
there is neither Theatre nor Church. No wonder it is an age of joy-rides. 
Might not the two boycotted institutions be wise to join forces? " 



THE WAR AND THE DRAMA 1 85 

upon this factor that they never treated an original theme 
at all — the daring of Agathon, the contemporary of Eurip- 
ides, in inventing the plot of "The Flower," finding no 
imitators. The moderns who have thrown over the ancients 
by inventing their own themes might also succeed in hand- 
ling their own times. It is all a question of the existence of 
the poets. Wordsworth told Charles Lamb he could have 
written Shakespeare, if he had had a mind, and Lamb re- 
torted it was precisely the mind that was lacking. Granted 
the poets, I see no inherent reason why the raw stuff of 
to-day should not be transfigured into tragic poetry in 
"the grand style." The war certainly, as M. Giraud says, 
offers us matter enough. Nor is it wanting in suggestions 
of manner. 

VI 

For the man in the street the grand tragedy of the war 
was to be the fate of the Kaiser, passing in punishment for 
his hubris from the apex of an Empire to St. Helena, or 
Devil's Island, or a cage, or even, according to Punch, a 
gibbet. This concept of tragedy by "decline and fall" is 
the conventional one. It is the tragedy of Agamemnon in 
^Eschylus, of Wolsey and Richard II in Shakespeare. 

" For God's sake, let us sit upon the ground 
And tell sad stories of the death of kings." 

But who cannot see that this isolation of an individual 
is utterly disproportionate to the gigantic scale and issues 
of the war? Already, in fact, the Kaiser has receded to the 
background even in Germany, where von Hindenburg and 
three or four others take precedence in the popular imagina- 
tion. The fall of the Kaiser would be almost anecdotal in 
relation to the real theme of the world- tragedy. 

The young German students who in defence of their 



1 86 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

State-concept advanced in close formation under a hellish 
British fire, singing Die Wacht am Rhein, saw themselves 
fighting for a modern Athens, menaced by all the world's 
devils and by barbarians of every hue. To the flower of 
England fresh from the public schools, who freely and in the 
cause of freedom had thrown up their careers with a gallant 
gesture, it was those very students who were barbarians 
and devils. Here is the true tragedy of the war, here the 
core of its pathos. "For the masses," writes a Times 
correspondent, "it is a purely defensive war brought about 
by a wanton attack of jealous foes upon the most peaceful 
country in the world." He happens to be writing of Ger- 
many, but the description will fit any of the many bel- 
ligerents. "The people are inspired by faith that their 
cause is absolutely justified. They take their losses as a 
kind of religious sacrifice." There lies the spiritual tragedy 
of our mutual murderings. For tragedy, as Hegel pointed 
out, may be a clash not of good and evil, of right and wrong, 
but of two goods or two rights. And even if one of these is 
less good or less right objectively — and we know from 
Bismarck how public opinion is manufactured in Press 
Bureaus and other laboratories — yet if to the protagonists 
themselves their ideal seems good or right, if they are alike 
in at least willing the highest, then the fact that one is more 
or less mistaken does not lessen the pity and terror of the 
crash when these opposed wills collide. 

And the tragedy is one not only of ideals, but of these 
incarnated in masses, not in individuals. Were we content 
to concentrate upon individuals we could find as great a 
subject of tragic irony in our guiltless Lloyd George as in 
the guilty Kaiser. The hated apostle of peace and social 
reform turned into the idolized Minister of Munitions! 
Munitions which are not only non-productive negatively 
but destructive positively! The savings and social hopes 



THE WAR AND THE DRAMA 1 87 

of generations past and to come swallowed up in and by- 
shells ! 

But Lloyd George would not, like the Kaiser, be the 
centre of a personal tragedy. He would be only a symbol — 
like the reported conversion of a rectory into a shell-factory 
— of the bankruptcy of civilization, Christianity, and social 
reform, in a world that the Victorian prophets saw moving 
majestically towards — 

" One far-off divine event." 

Socialists would place the tragedy in the breakdown of the 
growing international brotherhood, and the collapse of 
internationalism is certainly one of its elements, whether the 
nationalism of the belligerents is contrasted with conscious 
Socialism or with the unconscious communism of commer- 
cial exchange and cosmopolitan capital. Moreover the 
newer nations — the United States, Canada, Australia, 
the Argentine, had been recruiting their population upon 
an industrial and not upon an ethnic basis, and this reaction 
to a bristling nationalism cuts across all the latest tenden- 
cies of the steam and electric age of civilization. 

VII 

In a symbolic drama lies, therefore, one possible develop- 
ment of a modern tragedy: in the presentation of clashing 
world-currents through figures incarnating the opposed ten- 
dencies. But these figures must stake their all upon the 
issue. Like Kruger, who stood for nationalism, like Cobden, 
who stood for internationalism, they must be carved in 
granite. They cannot turn lightly from peace to war, 
from militarism to pacifism, from faith to unfaith. That 
way lies comedy. When I saw Kruger in his exile, standing 
before his great Dutch Bible, I realized that his tragedy 



1 88 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

lay less in his fall than in the clash of his nai've belief with 
the bigger battalions on whose side Providence had ranged 
itself. The dramatist, though he may use his figures as 
symbols and thus infuse his drama with a significance 
lacking to the suffering of individuals, must never forget 
that art deals with individuals and not with "isms." It is 
not in the collapse of internationalism or Socialism, of the 
Transvaal or Belgium, that poetic tragedy lies, but in the 
reflection of these events in the souls of the protagonists. 

In the Mass-Drama — another modern potentiality ex- 
ploited by Hauptmann in "The Weavers" and less purely 
by Hardy in "The Dynasts," that gigantic canvas more 
populated than Tintoretto's Paradise — no one individual 
summarizes the suffering. Hauptmann's hero is the crowd, 
and so is Hardy's despite that Napoleon occupies the fore- 
ground. Yet it is always through the individual soul 
that the great tragic forces are seen passing, refracted ac- 
cording to the nature of each. 

VIII 

Tragedy, interpreted as the clash of forces, and with the 
symbolization of these forces by individuals, or by masses 
seen through individuals, is thus our modern form of the 
higher drama. Mr. Galsworthy's "Strife," which is an 
exact exemplification of this formula of the clash, carries 
it in its very title. The "Armageddon" of Mr. Stephen 
Phillips, though its matter is burningly topical, is not a 
modern drama at all, and its supernatural stage machinery, 
its resuscitation of Beelzebub and Belial, is still more ob- 
solete. Even Mr. Hardy, whose vision is so fresh and fear- 
less, has environed his great epic-drama with the "Over- 
world," and created a series of "Phantom Intelligences" — 
Spirits and Choruses of Pity and Rumor, Spirits Sinister 



THE WAR AND THE DRAMA 1 89 

and Ironic, not to mention the Shade of the Earth. It 
looks as if the poets felt instinctively the need of that 
deeper background of which Maeterlinck speaks, as if 
without some equivalent of it they cannot respond to M. 
Victor Giraud's demand for a drama that shall be to us 
what the classic drama was to our forefathers. Most of all 
do they seem to need a direct medium for that "criticism of 
life" which, pace Matthew Arnold, is far more the drama's 
function than that of poetry in general. Yet, as a device 
for a running commentary upon the action, Mr. Hardy's 
neomythic figures are not markedly superior to the Greek 
Chorus, while, as a substitute for the old supernatural back- 
ground, they have the fatal defect of unreality. Mr. Hardy 
himself admits their insubstantiality without apparently 
understanding its cause. That lies in the fact that all the 
figures of traditional myth, from the talking serpent of 
Eden to those old German gods whom it is now sought to 
galvanize, had their day of belief, when they were felt as 
matter-of-fact as men and horses, and the aura of their 
ancient reality still lingers and vibrates about them. Of the 
Seraphs and the Cherubim the Hebrew liturgy even records 
the exact measurements from toe to wing-tip, and that the 
angel has still a living appeal is shown by the legend of the 
angels that appeared at Mons on the side of the British. 
But Mr. Hardy — as Charles Lamb said of much smaller 
writers — for the supernatural gives us the non-natural. 

IX 

Far more serious a contribution to the modern drama is 
Mr. Hardy's atmosphere of Fate. As given upon our stage 
by Mr. Granville Barker, "The Dynasts" was strangely 
debased into a British war-play with a patriotic tag, but 
it is in truth the spacious utterance of an agnostic Spinoza. 



19O THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

These swarms of figures from Napoleon to the smallest 
drummer-boy, from the beacon-watchers in Wessex to the 
candle-snuffers in the House of Commons, from empresses 
and arch-duchesses to trulls and market-women, are all 
exhibited as caught in the wave of a common destiny. The 
immanent World-Spirit — itself perhaps ironically uncon- 
scious — is seen animating the entire spectacle as an organic 
whole. We behold "as it were, the interior of a brain 
which seems to manifest the volitions of a Universal Will, 
of whose tissues the personages of the action form portion." 
The puppets, in short, dance and ironic spirits bid us 

" Mark the twitchings of this Bonaparte 
As he with other figures foots his reel." 

And one must confess that the world- war seems to afford 
an uncomfortable confirmation of Hardy's dramatic method. 
Here is an immense net in which all the nations have 
tangled themselves, though at the moment of the outbreak 
of war probably not a soul in the world wanted it, for even 
the Prussian militarists must have wished to draw back 
when they knew England was coming in. The frantic 
struggles of the diplomatists to break through their own coils 
were only equalled by the desperate efforts of Emperors. 
Read the last wild telegrams exchanged at dead of night 
between Tsar and Kaiser, between Emperor and King. 
These mightiest of mankind, who bestride the planet like 
Colossi and command the homage of half the human race, 
show as straws in a maelstrom. It might well seem as if — 
in Hardy's words: 

" Ere systemed stars were globed and lit 
The slaughters of the race were writ, 
And wasting wars, by land and sea, 
Fixed, like all else, immutably! " 

And the effort to end the war seems as beyond individual 



THE WAR AND THE DRAMA 1 9 1 

volition as the effort to avert it. An immense force, clearly 
made up of individual minds, yet gigantic and impersonal, 
urges forward the combat, denies retreat. 

" A will that wills above the will of each, 
Yet but the will of all conjunctively." 

It is a public opinion of which the largest constituent 
is fear of public opinion. We are all caught in the panic of a 
stampeding mob. Nobody wishes to push or be pushed, 
nobody knows why everybody is pushing, yet we are all 
pushed and push to our mutual destruction. 

Nevertheless, it is precisely because of its all-enveloping 
fatalism that "The Dynasts" cannot become a model for 
the modern dramatist. 

X 

Hardy himself seems to have felt that the drawback of 
"The Dynasts" lay in its impracticability on the stage. 
When he finished it he felt like sending it to the managers — 
so he once told me — with a "Play that if you can!" And, 
indeed, so cosmic a spectacle — some episodes of which 
were to be viewed from standpoints in the stellar system — 
might well have seemed adapted only to an audience of 
archangels. But nowadays aviators might almost supply 
the audience, and films taken by them, might almost pass 
on their visions to the patrons of the cinematograph, which 
could in any case render the big battle-pieces. No, the 
real objection to "The Dynasts" is that it is a puppet- 
play. 

In the Greek dramas Fate — at best an uncertain and 
wavering conception — was limited to a family, a dynasty; 
it was the nemesis of insolence, it was Ate visiting the sins 
of the fathers on the children. In Ibsen's "Ghosts," Ate 



192 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

took the modern shape of heredity, and was the nemesis 
for vice. But in Hardy the fog of Fate swathes and muffles 
and equalizes everything. If Fate is to play a part in mod- 
ern drama, it will be at most the Fate suggested in Maeter- 
linck's "Hour of Destiny." Here we have an evil Fate — 
a planetary will, or ill-will, making for the iron hegemony 
of Germany, yet avertible by a gigantic effort of the rest 
of the world. That is a conception not free from confusion, 
for what is avertible is not the will of the planet, but at 
most only a planetary tendency capable of being counter- 
acted by another planetary tendency — with which we 
may range ourselves! This sense of freedom to fight Fate 
is not to be found in the brooding Belgian poet, but the 
outraged Belgian patriot feels it in his blood and bones, 
and even Hardy turned from an agnostic philosopher into 
a Wessex yeoman when at the call of the blood he affixed 
a doggerel tag to the stage representation of his fatalistic 
drama, some words like 

"The images of old heroic wars 
May spur to emulate our ancestors." 

Philosophy, we perceive, breaks down in the stress of ac- 
tion, and it is no true philosophy that would build a drama 
on a basis which dramatists themselves, put to the test, 
are the first to abandon. 

XI 

But whether it is the business of the dramatist to indi- 
cate his own "planetary tendency" is a moot point. Ac- 
cording to Bradley, he should, and our British thinker finds 
fault with Hegel for ignoring that one of the colliding forces 
that make drama may be evil. No fault can be found with 
Stephen Phillips on this score, for his Kaiser is merely 
Attila reanimated by Satan. This is a sufficient warning 



THE WAR AND THE DRAMA 1 93 

against writing topical drama before Time, which tries 
all, has sifted things unmistakably. The spirit is like to 
be as partisan as the matter is raw. 

The dynamic drama has, indeed, its place. The dram- 
atist — like Brieux in some of his plays — may seek to en- 
force a point of view. But the dynamic drama, like the 
topical, has its risks. Like the political pamphlet, it is 
apt to become obsolete by its own success or its own failure, 
and to turn into a platitude or an absurdity. The poet is 
safest in limiting himself to the clash of forces. For life 
offers enough of beauty and pity and terror to build the 
highest art, and these abide eternally, and appeal afresh 
and under constantly changing aspects to every fresh 
generation. 

To the apostles of causes this lack of the didactic will 
appear as a grave defect, but if the poet has written 
greatly, he cannot avoid teaching. " Prudens quaestio dimi- 
dium responsionis." A wise question is half the answer, 
said Bacon in one of his profoundest sentences. And the 
artist's exposition of colliding forces cannot fail to throw 
light upon the rights and the wrongs thereof. 

Since these colliding forces run through creation — war 
proper being only what Bacon calls an "ostensive in- 
stance" — it follows that the drama, whose life is clash, is 
the truest of all literary forms. "All things run," said 
Heraclitus. He should have said that they run into one 
another. Nothing exists but by clashing against some- 
thing else, which by limiting it also defines it, just as the 
sea and the land — ■" commensurate antagonists" Elia 
finely calls them — perpetually bound and fashion each 
other. Tragedy is thus no external accident but the very 
root of reality 

" For tragic life God wot, 
No villain need be, 



194 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

says Meredith. But it is not only by what is false within 
that "we are betrayed." Tragedy is of the texture of things. 

" Sunt lachrymae rerum." 

Superfluous, therefore, to revive Beelzebub or Belial 
or to hatch new-fangled Spirits of Irony and Pity, when 
life itself offers every element of pathos and mystery, of 
horror and devilry, that poetic dignity demands. Out of 
the clash and conflict of the forces of life the modern dram- 
atist may build a tragedy as noble and unadorned as a 
Doric temple rising 'twixt sea and sky on its rocky head- 
land. 



THE TWO EMPIRES 

(For the Tercentenary Book of Homage) 

" If e'er I doubt of England, I recall 

Gentle Will Shakespeare, her authentic son, 
Wombed in her soul and with her meadows one, 
Whose tears and laughter hold the world in thrall, 
Impartial bard of Briton, Roman, Gaul, 

Jew, Gentile, white or black. Greek poets shun 
Strange realms of song — his ventures overrun 
The globe, his sovereign art embraces all. 

Such, too, is England's Empire — hers the art 
To hold all faiths and races 'neath her sway, 

An art wherein love plays the better part. 
Thus comes it, all beside her fight and pray, 

While, like twin sons of that same mighty heart, 
St. George and Shakespeare share one April day." 



i9S 



THE LEVITY OF WAR-POLITICS 

"I can just remember, though I was then a child, the controversy 
with the United States over Oregon which brought both countries 
to the verge of a conflict. In that case a vast and fertile territory 
was in dispute, a territory worth fighting for, so far as its value went. 
Yet who has ever doubted, when once the excitement had passed 
away, that it would have been a frightful misfortune for both nations 
had they fought for it? Since then, how many war panics have we 
not seen in England? At one time men talked of war with France as 
inevitable; and within the last ten years there were many who set up 
Russia as the enemy with whom there could be no settled peace till 
there had first been a war. Now, by the exercise of a little good sense 
and good temper on both sides, we have established friendly relations 
with both these countries. Why not with all countries?" — Lord 
Bryce in War and Peace, January, 1914. 

" Wait and see." — Mr. Asquith. 



Speaking in the House of Commons on the 26th January, 
1916, Sir Edward Grey described the most gigantic calamity 
that has ever befallen the human race as "a war forced 
upon Europe after every effort had been made to find a 
settlement without war, which could easily have been found." 
That cheers, and not hisses, followed this tremendous 
statement, means, I suppose, that it was taken as an im- 
peachment of Germany for refusing the arbitrament of 
reason, whether in the shape of the Conference proposed 
by the speaker or the reference to the Hague Tribunal 
suggested by Serbia and the Tsar. But if Germany re- 
fused the settlement that could so "easily have been found," 
she must either have done so because the diplomatists 

196 



THE LEVITY OF WAR-POLITICS 1 97 

bungled their job — in which appalling alternative Sir 
Edward Grey may have contributed to the bungle — or 
because (as in 1870) she desired and preferred that arbitra- 
ment of the sword which even the Hague Conference left 
open to independent States — in which case a settlement 
could not "easily have been found" and Sir Edward Grey 
was talking nonsense. 

An examination of the facts makes it probable that the 
first alternative is the correct one, and if it be indeed true 
that the diplomatists bungled their job, what is to be 
said of the monstrous levity with which mankind placed 
its fortunes in their hands? If States and their popula- 
tions have ceased to be estates passing with their tenantry 
from sovereign to sovereign by dower, the peoples of Europe 
are still puppets worked by the makers of their Foreign 
Policy. So far as England is concerned, its diplomatic 
representatives are notorious for knowledge of languages 
psychology or even foreign politics. Of the hundred and 
twenty, big and little, who "lie abroad for their country's 
good," few have any experience of the land of their abode, 
and the Consuls who do have experience can hardly ever 
rise to diplomatic rank. Diplomatic talent is understood 
to be limited to young gentlemen with not less than four 
hundred a year. Sir Edward Pears tells us that in the 
fateful months preceding the entry of Turkey into the war, 
neither our Ambassador at the Porte nor his main secre- 
taries could speak Turkish! That the Ambassadors, 
though the chartered spies of the nations, did not perceive 
the war coming, is thus not calculated to surprise us. 
One of them — a representative of the Entente Powers at 
Berlin — gravely told the interviewer of Der Tag that the 
grouping of the Powers in the European Balance was the 
surest safeguard of peace. The date of this Solomonic 
utterance was May, 1914. And our Ministers — our hired 



198 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

watchmen — were equally myopic. Speaking at the festive 
board of the Mansion House to the bankers and merchants 
of the City of London, Mr. Lloyd George — in the prehis- 
toric times when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer — 
said that if there was civil war in Ireland, complicated 
with industrial trouble, the situation would be "of the 
gravest with which any Government in this country has 
had to deal for centuries." This was said July 17th, 1914. 
And the same blindness appears in the Austrian Cabinet 
Ministers, all of whom had given their names in support 
of the Twenty-First World Peace Congress that was to 
have been held on September 15th to 19th, 1914, in the 
Parliamentary Buildings at Vienna. Well might the 
philosopher bid his son observe with how little wisdom the 
world is governed. 

II 

"Every effort had been made to find a settlement with- 
out war!" Sir Edward Grey spoke truly. Not only did 
he toil like a galley-slave in the last desperate days of 
Peace but he had just concluded a settlement with Ger- 
many over a number of Colonial danger-points. Unless 
Germany, therefore, absolutely meant war at any price, 
he was in a better position than ever to keep us at peace 
with her. Austria, as we have seen, had a completely 
Pacificist Cabinet. Why then did the negotiations fail? 
Light is thrown upon this question by an actual member 
of the British War-Cabinet. In an article published in 
the Daily Chronicle on the first anniversary of the war, 
Mr. Masterman has given us an historic picture of the 
"company of tired men" sitting in almost continuous 
session during twelve hot summer days and nights, con- 
scious that the whole future of civilization was at stake, 
and surrounded by a whirl of telegrams from every capital 



THE LEVITY OF WAR-POLITICS 1 99 

in Europe, to which Sir Edward Grey kept replying by 
an endlessly changing series of conciliatory propositions, 
pleading frenziedly if only for delay, even by a few hours. 
Imagine the fate of the world hanging on the tick of a 
clock, on the frantic telegraphing of a "company of tired 
men" who had even forgotten — one hears — that the dif- 
ference between London and Berlin time would make the 
respite even shorter than it seemed. 

Ill 

"In the changing hours of that terrific strain," it is no 
wonder that Mr. Masterman could not understand the 
"combination of truculence and contempt" which ran 
through the German replies to Sir Edward Grey's heroic 
efforts. A year later, with his brain less "tired," he offers 
the explanation that Germany thought Sir Edward was 
only "bluffing." The War Party at Vienna and Berlin 
started with the firm conviction that "England would not 
fight." 

There lies the dog — if I may quote a German proverb. 
Sir Edward Grey could not get himself believed. He was 
the voice of England yet he could not get her voice under- 
stood. If that is not to fail as her representative, I know 
not what failure is. And the incredulity with which he 
was met when he did menace war rested on his prior meek- 
nesses. He had been a Peace-at-any-price man. He had 
let the Balkan States and the oppressed minorities of the 
world understand that their sufferings must not disturb 
the repose of Europe. Let sleeping dogs lie, even if they 
overlaid infants. Peace was the supreme good. And, 
knowing how lightly all these dogs were sleeping and how 
carefully they had been divided into rival packs, one can 
understand his gingerly footsteps. But when at last, his 



200 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

sense of England's honor was stirred to fighting-point, and 
he stamped a bold foot, no Central-European dog cocked 
an ear or stiffened a bristle. Germany did not believe 
England would fight, attests Baron Beyens, the Belgian 
Minister at Berlin. 1 If the boy who cried "Wolf" too 
often was not believed when the wolf actually appeared, 
the same fate befell the wolf who had always gone dressed 
as a lamb. 

Could there be a grimmer irony? Not only has Sir 
Edward Grey always failed to bluff a la Palmerston, he 
has never even called up to the value of his hand. And 
when he at last does call up to its value, he is supposed to 
be bluffing! 

IV 

The conclusion is inescapable that had our relations with 
Russia and France been Alliances instead of Ententes, — 
"understandings" which are really misunderstandings — 
had they been public politics instead of secret commitments 
or obligations of honor, Germany would never have risked 
"taking on" England simultaneously with France and 
Russia, though she obviously wanted war with the two 
latter. 

Up to the eleventh hour France herself, nay, England 
herself, did not know if England was coming in — witness 
President Poincare's appeal to King George on July 31st, 
1 914 — how much less then could Germany know! Sir 
Edward Grey remained equivocal, he would and would 
not send support; we were not committed, he told both 
France and our House of Commons, and Lord Cromer 
authenticates his accuracy. "In July, 1914, the Govern- 
ment of this country was wholly free from any engagement 
to support France or Russia in the event of war." It was 

1 Germany Before the War. 



THE LEVITY OF WAR-POLITICS 201 

this facing-both-ways in the quest for Peace that finally 
broke it. 

Thus, it was not "The Balance of Power" which has 
failed to keep the peace of Europe, it was the uncertainty 
of whether the equilibrating Alliances existed or not on 
our side. We had their entanglements but not their prophy- 
lactic profit. 

In the last analysis, the blame lies less on the unfortunate 
Foreign Secretary who could not make himself understood 
in German than on the system which combines the defects 
of autocracy with the drawbacks of democracy: which 
gave Sir Edward Grey a free hand to undertake obligations 
that without the ratification of Parliament he could not 
fulfil. For part of his original indecision came from un- 
certainty as to the attitude of the Commons. 1 

They called it "continuity of Foreign Policy" — this 
subtraction of the power of treaty-making from Parlia- 
ment. Had the Inner Cabinet first asked Parliament 
what Foreign Policy was to be continuous, we should all 
have understood our responsibilities, we should have either 
made a peace with Germany or an unequivocal Alliance 
against her, and if we thought even France, Russia and 
England united would not be sufficient to keep the monster 
quiet, we should all have endorsed Lord Roberts's demand 
for National Service, and the transition to a more or less 
military state would have been made methodically and not 
enforced in a panic with all its disorder and discontent. 

Leaving the Cabinet in the midst of its tragic anxieties, 
Mr. Masterman one day — he tells us — went to speak at 
an immense provincial meeting. And when he spoke of the 
possible imminence of war, half the audience thought he 

1 In fairness to Sir Edward Grey something should perhaps be allowed for 
the miscalculation in Germany produced by the vagaries of Sir Edward 
Carson and the Pankhursts, and by the industrial unrest. 



202 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

was insane, and half that he was trying to evade the topics 
that really mattered. And this is twentieth century de- 
mocracy! "Be not like dumb driven cattle," said Long- 
fellow. But it is as cattle that our sons and our brothers 
have gone to the shambles. 



Again if it is true that a settlement could easily have been 
found a day before the war, why cannot it as easily be found 
a day after the war, not to say a year after? Why must we 
gamble with the lives and resources of generations because 
forsooth diplomatic dignity or Machiavellian prudence re- 
quires that neither side shall make a move towards concilia- 
tion? As if it were all a gigantic landslide beyond human 
interference ! Why should negotiations be broken off by war 
instead of remaining continuously in being, the rival diplo- 
matists feeling each other's pulse day by day? Crucified 
humanity cries out against such cataclysmic imbecility. 
Again, if a settlement could easily have been found, it can- 
not be so absolutely necessary that "the military domina- 
tion of Germany" shall be "wholly and finally destroyed." 
On August 2d, 1 914, it was, according to Sir Edward Grey, 
quite easy to live in Europe with Germany. On August 
4th this became so impossible that the flower of England 
and the resources of generations must be sacrificed to wipe 
out Germany. It may be said that the invasion of Belgium 
was a revelation: it was no revelation, for military plans 
existed against the contingency— as against every other — ■ 
and it had been threatened by German fire-eaters and dis- 
cussed by Mr. Belloc and other military writers. What Ger- 
many was we already knew from the treatment of Alsace- 
Lorraine and Prussian Poland. Yet we continued to live 
forty-four years in the same world with her. A cat has even 



THE LEVITY OF WAR-POLITICS 203 

lived amicably with a rat, according to an engaging story in 
the Times. A Talmudical parable runs: "You and I can- 
not live in the same world, said God to the haughty man." 
But England is not God, and she is only less "haughty" 
than Germany. 

One can understand that after those twelve hot tragic 
days, and that apparent "combination of truculence and 
contempt" in face of all the tired men's efforts for peace, 
Mr. Asquith's irritated brain should declare that we would 
not sheathe the sword till the military domination of Ger- 
many had been "wholly and finally" destroyed. But 
what one cannot understand is the levity with which Mr. 
Asquith repeats the exact words of this moment of brain- 
weariness without any attempt to modify their "truculence 
and contempt" or at least to clarify and expand them into 
a practical political proposition. 

I would respectfully commend to Mr. Asquith the pro- 
found warning of Burke that "firmness is then only a virtue 
when it accompanies the most perfect wisdom" and that 
"inconstancy is a sort of natural corrective of human in- 
firmity." 

VI 

"No one in his wildest dreams," says Mr. Masterman, 
"would have imagined a year ago to-day" that we should 
have 3,000,000 volunteers or raised a thousand millions 
for the war, etc., etc. Mr. Masterman in his justifiable 
pride as a Briton, forgets he is damning himself as a Cabinet 
Minister. If the Cabinet did not foresee they would raise 
the necessary forces and finances, how dared they go into the 
war? Bloch had explained in six volumes that war was now 
an affair of trenches, yet they — Mr. Lloyd George unblush- 
ingly confesses — had not foreseen that trench warfare and 
the munitions therefor would play such a great part. More- 



204 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

over — in view of this very European war — he and his col- 
leagues had arranged for an Expeditionary Force of 160,000 
men. That was to be England's military contribution, 
for she was — they said — a naval power. Yet within a year 
they discovered we needed to send not 160.000 men, nor 
even a million men, but even,' available Englishman, even 
at the risk of shattering the proverbial " palladium of 
British liberty." Imagine a housekeeper who, charged to be 
always prepared for a dozen guests of casual advent, is 
found, when the long-expected visitors arrive at last to have 
laid in two tomatoes and half-a-tin of condensed soup! 

vn 

"I don't think they play at all fairly, and they all quar- 
rel so dreadfully one can't hear oneself speak — and they 
don't seem to have any rules in particular, at least, if there 
are, nobody attends to them,— and you've no idea how 
confusing it is, all the things being alive. " So said Alice in 
Wonderland and the most cursory examination of history 
reveals it as a Wonderland truly Alician. If the present 
war was due to the ambiguity attaching to Ententes, the 
Crimean war was due to the ambiguity of a Treaty. Says 
Justin McCarthy in his History of Our Own Times (Vol. II, 
Cap. 25): 

''It may not perhaps give an uninitiated reader any very 
exalted opinion of the utility and beauty of diplomatic arrange- 
ments, to hear that disputes covering more than a century of 
time, and causing at least two great wars, arose out of the im- 
possibility of reconciling two different interpretations of the 
meaning of two or three lines of a treaty." 

The Franco-Prussian war — the prelude to the present 
catastrophe — reveals the same terrifying flippancy; high 



THE LEVITY OF WAR-POLITICS 205 

politics would be high comedy were it not high tragedy. 
Although the first link in the fatal chain was forged by 
Germany, when the mulish militarist brain of Moltke was 
allowed to override the sagacity of Bismarck, and Alsace- 
Lorraine was annexed, yet it cannot be overlooked that it 
was France herself that loosed the thunderbolts of war. 
However Bismarck by doctoring the Ems telegram may 
have fooled her, yet it was to the top of her own bent that 
she was fooled, and had there been no French fire-eaters 
and no Empress eager for the glory of her son and her 
Church, the Franco-Prussian war would never have been. 
To quote another modern historian: x 

"Whether the majority of the Assembly really desired war 
is even now a matter of doubt. But the clamor of a hundred 
madmen within its walls, the ravings of journalists and incen- 
diaries, who at such a time are to the true expression of public 
opinion what the Spanish inquisition was to the Christian reli- 
gion, paralyzed the will and understanding of less infatuated 
men." 

These madmen, as it turned out. ruined first their own 
country and then the world. Their ardor for war was only 
equalled by their unpreparedness for it. and France was 
humbled to the dust. England had been pro-German but 
her chivalrous sympathy with the hardly-entreated loser 
might have turned her pro-French, had not the washing of 
dirty linen after the- war. revealed "a private engagement 
between France and Prussia which would have allowed 
France on certain conditions to annex Belgium." 2 Alarmed 
and angry. England pressed upon France and Prussia a 
new treaty by which all three Powers bound themselves 
afresh to maintain the independence of Belgium. But this 

1 G. A. Fyffe, History of Modern Europe. 

2 Justin McCarthy: A History of Our Own Times, Vol. IV. 



206 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

was not the only flouting of parchment, for Russia had 
seized the opportunity of Prussia and France being at 
death-grips to disavow the Treaty of Paris neutralizing the 
Black Sea, and Italy profited by the same pre-occupation 
of "The Concert of Europe" to reoccupy Rome. No won- 
der Gilbert in "The Happy Land " made Mr. Ayrton define 
a treaty as "that useful instrument which enables the man 
of honor to promise, when taken at a disadvantage, that 
which (under happier circumstances) he has not the re- 
motest intention of performing." With European politics 
thus proceeding "on the bold assumption that the stronger 
has always a right to do anything he pleases with the 
weaker," 1 or on the well-known formula of Wordsworth: 

"The good old rule, the simple plan 

That they may take who have the power, 
And they may keep who can," 

the attempt to apply suddenly a standard of "All for Law, 
or the World Well Lost," is of a flippancy almost too great 
even for politics. 

VIII 

This "law of the stronger" was accepted by Europe when 
it allowed Alsace-Lorraine to be annexed and blood-and- 
iron to be established as the ruling principle. The sequel 
has been in keeping. Rape was followed by mesalliance, 
when France, re-estranged from England, distraught be- 
tween dreams of Revanche and nightmares of further 
disintegration at the hands of the Huns threw herself into 
the arms of Russia and her savings into its lap, the first 
civilization in the world thus mismating with one of the 
most backward. " The Rights of Man " which had been the 
gospel and glory of the ville lumiere were abandoned with a 

Justin McCarthy: A History of Our Own Times, Vol. IV. 



THE LEVITY OF WAR-POLITICS 207 

levity worthy of a Mexican mob. I remember the days 
when the Franco-Russian alliance was being cemented, the 
popularity at the Paris Foire au Pain d'Epices of the ginger- 
bread effigies of hand-shaking French and Russian sailors. 
In the very quarter of the Bastille the fickle populace had 
already forgotten Liberty: throughout France the peasants 
strangled her with their stockings. 

Nor can all our admiration for the sublime stand France 
is making to-day — her whole population knit in love and 
sacrifice — blind us to her levity in not bearing sons for the 
day of battle. By an infinitely imprudent prudence and a 
tragically improvident providence she reduced her families 
to a minumum and simultaneously with pining for Alsace- 
Lorraine and reaching out for Morocco, she surrendered 
portions of her own beloved soil to black and yellow labor, 
importing Africans and coolies for her vineyards and coal- 
mines. 1 

The ominous growth of the German navy brought 
England more vaguely into the same grouping and ulti- 
mately into battle-line with Russia, her bogey of the last 
generation, with Serbia from which she had only recently 
withdrawn her minister, Montenegro, whose war habits, 
though they kindled Tennyson, have chilled Miss Durham 
who really knows them, and other still less civilized popula- 
tions. With equal levity the people of Goethe and Bee- 
thoven fraternized with the illiterate Turk, the people of 
Luther with the lethargic Mussulman, and the people of 
Kant with the assassins of Armenia. Even in such a record 
of levity the mutability of Italy stands pre-eminent. 

The levity in the history of Belgium belongs rather to 
the Great Powers than to the tiny territory that, though 
neutralized, was allowed to have an army and even to go on 
great imperial adventures, denied to Germany. To domes- 

1 Times, July 13, 19 14. 



208 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

ticate a kitten and then let it produce a brood of Congolese 
tiger-cats seems to me an inconsequence of which only 
politicians are capable. The Belgium Minister for the 
Colonies told us at a banquet this February that "Belgium 
without the Congo was unthinkable." I am very willing 
Belgium shall have a great colonial Empire — she is perhaps 
the one country that now deserves it, and whose tribulations 
will have taught her sympathy even with blacks. But my 
brain is quite able to think of a Belgium without the Congo, 
and quite unable to think of a Congo'd Belgium as entitled 
to a protective neutrality. In such a sphere as politics — 
where "to think clear and to see straight" is impolitic — 
it is no wonder that none of the belligerent populations is 
able to bear the truth about its own military and naval 
operations, and that the word "success" must accompany 
every notification,— a levity that does not shrink even from 

"Success of our Retreat!" 

How long we hid from ourselves the truth about the Dar- 
danelles when, in the words of Arnold White, "you cannot 
pierce the earth with a bayonet in any square yard of the 
beaches of Hellas and Suvla Bay without touching the 
corpse of a British, an Australian or an Indian soldier!" 
This monumental example of levity in military operations 
was probably mainly due to neglect of Lord Salisbury's 
famous advice to "get large maps." We were only a few 
miles from an historic capital. Looking round the world for 
some comforting instance of absence of levity, I can only 
find it in the warnings of those German Socialists who op- 
posed the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine as holding the 
seeds of future war, and in the Social Democratic Group 
in the Alsace-Lorraine Assembly, who eighteen months be- 
fore this war, issued a manifesto appealing for a loyal 
understanding between France and Germany, as even to be 



THE LEVITY OF WAR-POLITICS 2CX) 

re-annexed to France, they could not contemplate "another 
war which would surpass in horror all that the human brain 
can imagine." 

IX 

On July 17, 1914, Mr. Lloyd George, addressing the 
bankers and merchants of the City of London at the Man- 
sion House dinner already mentioned, said: 

"It is sad that so much of the capital of the world should 
be wasted in wars and preparations for wars. During the last 
ten years alone the nations of the world have spent 4,500 mil- 
lions in war and preparations for war — 1,000 millions more 
than Britain has advanced in fifty years to civilize the world." 

Not three weeks later he had consented to a war which now 
costs us five millions a day, and the total cost of which for 
the Allies is some twelve millions a day, the very sum which 
paid his vaunted old age pensions for a year. Well might 
Lord Sumner say that "if the House of Lords and the 
House of Commons could be thrown into a volcano every 
day the loss represented would be less than the daily cost 
of the campaign." The expression was unfortunate, since 
our sense of loss in such a contingency, is not acute, but 
the image is vivid. And to think that John Bright once 
fulminated because the annual expenditure on our Army 
and Navy was £26,000,000. It has been calculated that 
should the war last another year, the total cost to the Allies 
would be £8,600,000,000. Mr. Arthur Kiddy, City Editor 
of the Morning Post, estimated the total expense for all the 
belligerents at £12,000,000,000 of which rather more than 
£3,000,000,000 would fall upon England. 1 Such astronomi- 

1 "The cost of no war has even approximated to the cost of the present war. 
The largest amount spent by Great Britain on war in a single year before 
the present war was £71,000,000. The Revolutionary and Napoleonic War 
cost in the aggregate £831,000,000; that war was spread over twenty years 



2IO THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

cal figures are perhaps the cause of the levity with which 
we dispense them. They mean no more to us than the 
distances of the Milky Way. But even these figures are 
too small, for they do not allow for the fact that the ex- 
penditure is destructive and each pound destroys — it has 
been estimated — ten shillings. Dr. Anna S. Shaw in her 
fascinating autobiography relates how when a child of four 
she visited Speke Island off Queenstown and watched the 
convicts, whose "hard labor" was to carry buckets of water 
from one shore to the other — and empty them into the sea. 
But war-labor is even more wasteful for it does not merely 
dissipate present labor, it destroys past labor too. It has 
even been said that every pound spent on the war destroys 
another ten shillings. Not to mention the cost of that 
cheapest of commodities, human life. 

" Levitas, levitas, omnia levitas! " 

The Crimean War cost £67,500,000; that was spread over three financial 
years. The Boer War cost £211,000,000; that was spread over four financial 
years." Interview with Mr. Lloyd George, Pearson's Mazagine, March, 
1915- 



TEE PLACE OF PEACE 

" So came I to a scene of Witches' Sabbath, 
Ear-cracking cannon-claps made devils'-thunder, 
Mixed with the hiss and flare of foul explosives 
And screams of disembowelled men and horses. 
Green o'er the soil a ghastly vapor glided, 
In heaven, roaring, hung death-raining navies, 
Rocks burst into eye-gouging chips of granite, 
The waters spouted up in boiling pillars, 
Death boomed at once from earth and sky and ocean, 
And men of every race, black, white or yellow, 
At death-grips, clawed and stabbed and bit and throttled. 
Miasma-breeding, lay unburied corpses, 
Envied of youths gangrened and semi-frozen. 
Leviathans ten thousand shipwrights toiled at, 
With freights, the harvest of a world of workers, 
Were gulped like paper-boats, and as an infant 
Rubs figures from its slate, the painful garner 
Of generations — cities, railways, harbors — 
And carven treasure of the Middle Ages 
Were childishly expunged. I saw around me — 
Looming incarnadined, phantasmagoric — 
Millions of torsos, eyeless, noseless, limbless, 
Millions of women, binding up the bleeding, 
Millions of women wailing o'er the corpses 
To make which other women fashioned fire-balls; 
On all the roads processions blister-footed — 
Old men, and haggard women, violated, 
And crying children falling dead from hunger. 
God! such a maze and burr bemused my brain-cells, 
That half distraught I asked a dying groaner, 
' What is this place, and what purports this frenzy? ' 
'It is,' he said, with kindling eye and accent, 
' The plain of Armageddon, and the war 
'For righteousness.' 



212 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

"I fled that dreadful valley, 
Stumbling through bloody mists and fumes and roarings, 
Until the last reverberations faded, 
And in the sunlit grounds of some great mansion 
I found sweet haven. There among the roses, 
And on the grass in all its green enchantment, 
Walked gentle women with attendant mankind, 
Whilst here and there upon the sward recumbent 
Beside their shadows in some nook of summer, 
I noted peaceful figures so engrossed, 
Each seemed the spirit of the brooding season. 
One read, one toyed with chess-men, one lay fluting, 
One wrote a scroll in inks of many colors, 
One drew great pentagons and epicycles, 
One calculated horoscopes; the noblest, 
A priestly figure with a beard white-flowing, 
Interpreted a text apocalyptic. 
Enraptured with this place of peace, I questioned 
A passer what it was. 

Quoth he, 'A mad-house! "' 



THE MILITARY PACIFISTS 

"It was the same artifice which the devil employs, when he would 
seduce those who are on their guard, by transforming himself from 
an angel of darkness into an angel of light, and setting plausible ap- 
pearances before them, carries his point, if the cloven foot be not seen 
in the beginning." — Don Quixote. 



The Pacific Pacifists are bad enough for the temper. The 
"sea-green incorruptible" of Pacifism for example re- 
proaches me for refusing to think the soldier negligible. 
"Fighting is for tigers," he writes to me, "and I do not hap- 
pen to be a tiger." Unfortunately other creatures do happen 
to be tigers and I am vastly obliged by the soldier and his 
rifle. The Pacifist is a shirker not of military duty but of 
unpleasant facts. Needs must when the devil drives and a 
citizen army, purely for defensive purposes, with civil 
rights, and war under democratic control is — at this stage 
of human evolution when Reason and Love are embryonic 
and insufficiently diffused — in no essential contradiction 
with the spirit of Pacificism. So, too, righteous rebellion 
is no more war proper, that resistance to assassination is 
violence proper. 

But the Pacific Pacifists are bearable compared with the 
Military Pacifists. Their notion of ending war by wiping 
out Germany is the most dangerous form of homicidal 
mania now endemic. These well-meaning Utopians over- 
look two small things — that you cannot end Germany and 
that you cannot end war, at least in our time. It is true 

213 



214 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

Mr. Asquith continues to ingeminate that "the military 
domination of Prussia" must be "wholly and finally" 
destroyed, but Mr. Asquith appears to believe like the Bell- 
man in The Hunting of the Snark, " What I tell you three 
times is true." 1 Even the Russian Foreign Minister, 
Sazonoff, has had sense enough to declare that you cannot 
extirpate nearly seventy millions of people. And unless you 
do extirpate them you can no more get rid of their belli- 
cosity than you can breed hedgehogs without bristles. 

Delenda est Carthago. After twenty centuries, nineteen 
of them Christian, two great countries again at death- 
grips, one omnipotent at sea and one apparently invincible 
on land, and each crying this of the other. 

It is true I have myself walked over the ruins of Carthage. 
But it required Three Punic Wars and a hundred and eight- 
een years to destroy her and Cato of the famous delenda est 
did not live to see it done. Whereas our pacifist militarists 
want to make only one bite at their cherry. And this al- 
though as Bonar Law pointed out it was the commercial 
Carthage that the military Rome conquered, and though 
it is we that have, like Carthage, the motley hordes, and 
Germany which has, like Rome, the unified army. 

As a rule, Utopians do no harm, if little good. But in 
chasing the mirage of a Germany in ruins, they may work 
woeful mischief to England, setting her fortunes, as they 
do, on the fall of a single die, and declaring, as they do, 
that nothing matters — not even bankruptcy — so long as the 
pursual of their Will-o' -the- Wisp is unrelaxed. Being mili- 
tarists, they imagine themselves practical, and that is the 
worst delusion of all. When a "practical" man gets a 
bee in his bonnet, his very command of the machinery of 
action makes him infinitely more dangerous than your pale 

1 Since this was written both Mr. Asquith and Sir Edward Grey have 
fortunately toned down the crudity of the Guild Hall Formula. 



THE MILITARY PACIFISTS 215 

academic idealists. Imagine Sancho Panza tilting against 
windmills! In his fury against giants he would have actu- 
ally have destroyed the sails as well as himself. Whereas 
Don Quixote only killed seven sheep when he mistook them 
for the squadrons of Alifanfaron, his henchman would have 
slain the flock. Your military pacifist not only idealizes 
his impossible Dulcinea, he would actually marry her. 
He would pay a pedigree price for Rozinante. 

II 

The notion of ending war by the sword is not only chimer- 
ical — like the notion of ending beards by the razor — it 
has not even the moral value of most Utopian ideas. As 
I wrote to a Peace Conference: "Tennyson, who is con- 
sidered out-of-date, though he predicted the Zeppelins, 
has really said the last word on the subject. 

' Move upward, working out the beast, 
And let the ape and tiger die.' 

In short, all war is a gorilla warfare, and can only end when 
the gorilla is worked out. Even therefore if we could ex- 
tirpate Germany and leave our children the legacy of a 
compulsory military peace, they would only be like the 
children of millionaires, who generally go to the dogs. 
Every generation must work out its own peace or fight 
its own battles. There is no pre-natal salvation. The 
world can only be saved by Reason and Love. But even 
of these each generation must bring its own." 

Ill 

The whole conception of setting up posterity in vegetable 
beatitude belongs in fact to the same order of religious 



2l6 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

thinking as the lotus-eating heaven that awaits ourselves. 
"No patched-up peace," cries the Stop-the-peace party. 
"Nothing that would expose our children to a revival of 
the German menace." We are forsooth to be wild boars 
that our children may be tame pigs in clover. But we 
cannot, if we would, steal their burdens and responsibilities. 
Nothing can be saved or lost except for our own generation. 
To suppose that you can establish a State — or even a state 
of peace in sacula sceculorum is a fallacy. As Mr. G. K. 
Chesterton has pointed out, a post painted white does not 
remain white. Zoroaster and the old Persian theologians 
who saw the universe under the image of the war of 
Ormuzd and Ahriman failed in insight and courage 
when they threw in the sop of a "final" victory with the 
coming of "The Good Kingdom," or "The Kingdom of 
Desire." 

The reward of battle is not victory but the beginning 
of new battle and the cost of everything must be paid 
again and again. Nothing is on sale but everything on 
hire, and it is not liberty alone whose price is eternal vigil- 
ance. Have we not just seen that no British might, how- 
ever ancient, is beyond challenge, no British right, however 
constitutional, beyond annulment, no British newspaper, 
however old-established, beyond bankruptcy? 

One might ask the Military Militarists at least, why if 
war brings so many noble virtues, our children should be 
removed from its influences. And one might ask even the 
Pacifist Militarists why our children should not "do their 
bit." 

"The work we have on hand must be done once for all," 
says the Times. That is dangerous nonsense. "Never 
again!" says the Military Pacificist. And echo answers 
mockingly: "Ever again!" For there must be either a win 
or a draw. If a win the conquered side will prepare for 



THE MILITARY PACIFISTS 217 

reprisals, — die Rache or La revanche! — if a draw, either 
side will think 

"Oh, the little more, and how much it is." 

Far saner is the saying of the Talmud: "It is not thy 
duty to complete the work, neither is it thy duty to neglect 
it." 

IV 

When therefore we find Mr. Asquith saying at a Lord 
Mayor's banquet, "Be the journey long or short, we shall 
not pause or falter until we have secured for the smaller 
States of Europe their charter of independence, and for 
Europe itself, and for the world at large, their final emanci- 
pation from the reign of force," though our heart glows, 
and we see the world through rosy mists as of Guildhall 
port, yet our head misgives us. For, though Mr. Asquith's 
journey is in the right direction and I wish him Godspeed, 
yet if it means that this final emancipation is to be wrought 
at one blow— and if to deliver this blow we are to throw 
the "British Empire's last shilling" upon the green cloth, 
then it is a madder Quixotism than Cervantes ever dreamed 
of. But Mr. Asquith's knight-errantry seems to know no 
bounds. Did he not say when he was falsely accused of 
telling what would at worst have been a diplomatic or 
white-paper lie about Lord Kitchener's alleged resignation, 
that that would have been "stooping to an infamy almost 
indescribable ? " What words, I wonder, would he have had 
left for a statesman who remained in office after saying 
thai" sooner than introduce conscription he would resign ? 

So white a flower of blameless life has seldom been seen 
in a politician's buttonhole. But if standards of honor 
are to be kept at such Alpine heights, we cannot lower our 
standards of sanity too abysmally. The Stop-the-Peace 



2l8 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

Party should really attend to Tolstoy's adjuration to "stop 
and think." 



As for Perpetual Peace, Immanuel Kant who wrote a 
great little treatise on the subject in the practical form of a 
treaty did not expect humanity ever to reach it. It was 
to be a "regulative" idea. And it was to be approached 
not by militarism but by moral improvement. Nor was 
it possible — without grave injustices — till humanity had 
organized itself in Republics. Kant, who was as shrewd 
as he was profound — he had Scotch blood — saw to the 
heart of a subject about which most pacifists — and most 
of the well-meaning World-Parliament projects now pour- 
ing so profusely from the press of every country — merely 
grope and fumble. 

Before you can have "the United States of Europe" 
you must have the separate Republican States that Amer- 
ica united. To unite States at so many varying phases 
of political evolution— even if a principle of representa- 
tion could be found — would tend to stereotype the back- 
ward. For either the central authority would not inter- 
fere with their internal affairs, thus leaving their present 
despots a free hand, or it would interfere to repress revolu- 
tion and thus make it eternally hopeless. 

It was upon this rock that the Holy Alliance of 1815 
split. Peace, though honestly sought, was sought not on 
the basis of a rearrangement of the world by Reason and 
Love but on the existing basis of autocracies and mon- 
archies with a potentiality of dragooning minorities, na- 
tional or sectional, by the " Supernational Authority" 
of which we now hear again. Moreover, when it is sought 
to set up a tribunal of justice among the nations on the 
analogy of justice among individuals, the analogy breaks 



THE MILITARY PACIFISTS 210, 

down. For what is a nation? What is England? What 
Germany? What Russia? These are living and therefore 
perpetually shifting concepts, always expanding, diminish- 
ing, changing. How again find a common basis for Mexico 
and China, for Canada and Monaco? If it be said that 
individuals, too, differ in size and strength and wealth and 
are constantly changing in all these qualities, and yet a 
common rule of justice has been established, the answer 
is that it has not been established. A state of comparative 
social peace has been established — tranquillity tempered 
by strikes and starvation. It is not, as Nietzsche argued, 
that social ethics is the device of the weak to keep them- 
selves in existence against the strong. Quite the contrary. 
The social order is the device of the strong to keep the 
weak in existence for their service. Until a righteous social 
order is established we cry "Peace, peace, when there is 
no peace," even in the individual commonwealth. 

"The Kingdom of God," like Charity, begins at home. 
When it is in reasonable swing there, we may begin to 
link it up with other provinces of the Kingdom. To bring 
about a millennium of the existing order — -uninformed by 
social passion and devoid even of the tragic spirituality 
of war — would be to bring about not the Kingdom of God 
but of the Devil. The road to Mr. Asquith's noble ideal 
is long and toilsome. I am very willing we shall not pause 
and falter in it, but to suppose that the destruction of 
Germany is the end of the journey, to cry Delenda est 
Carthago in the name of Perpetual Peace generations before 
the world is ripe for it, is mere chicanery. 

VI 

Perpetual Peace, in its literal sense, is as much a fallacy 
as perpetual motion, nay a greater fallacy, for perpetual 



220 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

motion, though we cannot create it, at least exists in nature, 
whereas perpetual peace does not exist at all. If it did, 
it would mean a universe not of life, but of death, and it is 
as barren an ideal for humanity as for nature. What is 
meant, however, is not stagnation, but movement without 
murder. Even this cannot be found in nature, nor can 
humanity create it except within the narrow human sphere. 
But it is possible there as within the narrower spheres of 
families, clans, and nations, and were the Martians really 
able to invade our globe and perpetually menacing us, it 
would be achieved to-morrow. Hegel who preceded Treit- 
schke and Moltke in glorifying war, held war was indispen- 
sable because everything needed opposition. He forgot 
that humanity finds all the opposition it needs in Nature. 

The question remains whether our Quixote could utterly 
destroy Germany, even if it was the knightly thing to do. 
But that is a technical question which the Militarists can 
answer better than I. My province is merely to point 
out that that way lies Madness, not Perpetual Peace. 

" From the lie there comes no life," said Heine, " and 
God can never be saved by the Devil." 



THE ABSURD SIDE OF ALLIANCES 



"Now B, on some convenient day, 
Will make a secret league with A, 
In which they practically say 

They'll go for C together; 
The secret, being one of state, 
Is certain to evaporate, 
And C may soon anticipate 

Extremely sultry weather. 
So C his neighbor will fatigue 
With patriotic base intrigue, 
Until he makes a secret league 

With each of both the others; 
And any two to fight are loth, 
Because the third is bound by oath 
To fight against and for them both, 

As enemies and brothers." — Adrian Ross. 

These immortal lines by a confectioner of musical comedy, 
who in a more literate age might have become our Aris- 
tophanes, sufficiently dispose of "The Balance of Power" 
as a moral mechanism. "At the very moment the Act of 
Algeciras was signed," wrote Baron Greindl, the Belgian 
diplomatic representative at Berlin in 191 1, "three at 
least of the participating Powers were contracting under- 
takings among themselves which were incompatible with 
their public professions." As the poet goes on to say — and 
Italy and Bulgaria have illustrated the thesis afresh — 

"You cannot depend 
On a foe or a friend 
When it comes to The Balance of Power." 



2 22 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

The question is, however, not one of morals but of 
politics — of security, first, against war, secondly, against 
conquest. But the first kind of security seems — for any 
individual member of the rival groups of Powers — to be 
diminished rather than enhanced, since friction between 
any two members compromises all the others. Indeed, it 
is less surprising that the jugglers should drop one of so 
many balls than that they should keep them all safely in 
the air. And the fall of one means the collapse of all. 
Thus a shot fired in Serbia has assassinated millions of 
every race, creed and color, and sent people to die at their 
Antipodes or in regions they had never heard of. Aus- 
tralians have perished in Gallipoli, and the bones of Dorset 
Yeomanry lie in the deserts of Tripoli. 

Security against conquest is, however, another matter. 
San Marino has maintained herself for centuries by playing 
off one neighbor against another, and why should not the 
British Empire copy San Marino? That policy is not 
refuted by Mr. Shaw's comparison of it to the attempt to 
empty the Atlantic by pouring its water into the Pacific. 
Redistribution of forces is its essence. To balance things 
in motion means perpetual shifting of position. To be with 
Prussia against France in 1815 and with France against 
Prussia in 191 5; to be with Turkey against Russia in the 
Crimean War and with Russia against Turkey to-day, is 
not the absurdity I would indict. For Lord Salisbury to 
say "The Ottoman Empire must stand," and for Mr. As- 
quith to say it must fall, is not ridiculous. Circumstances 
alter cases. What is absurd in this shifting quadrille is to 
lampoon the partner of yesterday and beslaver the partner 
of to-day. 



THE ABSURD SIDE OF ALLIANCES 223 

II 

There are obviously two and only two methods of polit- 
ical alliance. The one seeks the line of greatest united 
power, the other of greatest common ideals. The first is 
a mechanical union, the second a moral. A moral union 
is obviously only possible between nations of the same 
degree of political development. Thus when Russia pur- 
sued what the foreign editor of the Novoe Vremya now 
calls the "ill-omened policy" of supporting " thrones," 
wherever they tottered; when it combated Republican 
France, propped up Turkey, and built up Prussia and the 
Kaiser, its alliances were moral. When it joined Re- 
publican France, the alliance was mechanical. 

Now it may be politically permissible for a nation to 
marry, so to speak, for money and position; and not for 
love. But it is not permissible to pretend that the heiress 
is your affinity. For though it is not theoretically im- 
possible to achieve such a happy match, it is an unlikely 
political contingency that the path of safety and power 
should also coincide with the course of true love or the road 
to righteousness. Such alliances, if not immoral, become 
so when they pretend to be moral. 

Yet it is this make-believe that all nations childishly 
play at, it is in honor of this puerile pretence that Presi- 
dents, Kings and Emperors raise their glasses. The rich 
and newly-divorced bride is invariably beautiful, and the 
love that binds her and her new partner is a romantic 
passion. In the quest of "The Balance of Power" the 
erstwhile President of the Amphictyon of Europe must woo 
with mandolin, purse, and sonnet every minx and drab 
of a State that once panted for a single glance from his 
beaux yeux. Sir Edward Grey is simultaneously glorified 
as the paladin of Europe and vilipended for having failed 



224 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

to win over what is now described as " bloodthirsty Bul- 
garia." One wonders if Roumania got ready noble mani- 
festors for either contingency. 

The notion that our alliances can be moral and not me- 
chanical survives the revelation that Sir Edward Grey 
has had to bribe his way, or has tried to bribe his way, 
offering now Cyprus to Greece, anon the Dalmatian coast 
to Italy, and that we are compelled to tolerate the Mili- 
tarismus of Japan against China, despite our treaty obliga- 
tion to maintain the integrity of Chinese independence. 

The German Chancellor in a flash of candor admitted that 
the invasion of Belgium was wrong. The blush of shame 
was transient and soon sicklied o'er with the pale cast of 
sophistry. But why blush at all? Why should we not 
all admit that necessity knows no law — and no love? 

Ill 

With Alliances candidly envisaged as political and me- 
chanical, the incessant chassez-croisez of the political dance 
would not expose us to the indecent necessity of virtuous 
protestation. Germany — herself guilty of siding with the 
assassins of the Armenians — makes great play with our 
hypocrisy in calling in colored troops to "take up the 
white man's burden." It is strange how, forgetting that 
Krieg ist Krieg, she becomes as romantic as Ruskin where 
other people's cold-bloodedness is concerned. The real in- 
advisability of such Alliances lies in their future rebound 
on ourselves. 

But apart from the fact that colored interests are threat- 
ened by Germany no less than white interests, these motley 
forces are to us mere engines and munitions of war, and 
they have the advantage over white allies that there is no 
need to express devoted affection for them. It is true a 



THE ABSURD SIDE OF ALLDANCES 225 

Manchester paper suggested I ought to recognize the en- 
lightenment of our Fiji Islanders in choosing between us 
and Prussian militarism, but this was surely written by 
a budding Swift. 

No, let us not be too adoring even of our white allies. 

Lord Melbourne said there was no d d nonsense of 

merit about the Garter; let there be no d d nonsense of 

sentiment about Alliances. Then we shall all look less 
silly. To-day, owing to the tactlessness of the Censor and 
the Editors, Russia has been so overdone with compli- 
ments that she has grown suspicious and begins to ask 
what chestnuts England wants pulled out of the fire. 1 As 
for France, what schoolboy does not remember the disdain 
for the defeated of Waterloo, the miseries of Froggy, the 
French Master? Is he a hero now, I wonder, in every dor- 
mitory? 

An octogenarian tells how he formed one of a bodyguard 
of young men to protect John Bright from the angry Man- 
chester mob. Bright was then the "pro-Russian" who was 
ready to see Turkey dismembered, as Tzar Nicholas I 
had so wickedly suggested. 

Again and again Bright protested in his speeches that 
though he thought the safety of England did not demand 
that the military power of Russia should be wholly and 
finally destroyed, yet he was as good an Englishman as 
any anti-Russian. 

The inconvenient memory of this octogenarian recalls 
that France was the Germany of his young days, the 
country that had to be crushed before she got too strong. 
Then the rhyme ran: 

1 Even from the utilitarian point of view the Alliance of Russia with 
Western Powers is not easily workable, for, as M. Stephen Pichon, late 
French Foreign Minister points out, when co-operation is required, the 
different political constitutions are a great bar to consultation and joint 
resolutions. 



2 26 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

"Two bony Frenchmen and one Portugee, 
One jolly Englishman can lick all three." 

In 1853 there was a panic. Bent on revenge for Waterloo, 
France, it was said, designed to invade England. A pro- 
Frenchman was a traitor. Yet by the end of 1853 the Eng- 
lish and French were allies in the Crimean War. French- 
men changed from "a people of treacherous and envious 
instincts" to "a polished and chivalrous nation," and the 
octogenarian remembers seeing Englishmen "hugging, and 
even kissing them, Continental fashion." 

"I have known Russians," he says, "to be regarded as the 
heroic saviors (along with ourselves) of Europe against France, 
then as dark conspirators against all civilization and human 
freedom, and finally as heroes of defence against the aggres- 
sions of a world-threatening German militarism. The Turks 
I have known in turns to be regarded as innocent 'gentlemen' 
persecuted by Russia, vile assassins of Bulgaria, enlightened 
reformers under a regime of Young Turks, and finally as des- 
picable tools of German wickedness. I need not say how Bul- 
garia itself has changed from good to bad, or how the Boers of 
South Africa have changed from bad to good. In my young 
days the Prussians were so popular that public-houses were 
called after their kings and generals. The hope of all English- 
men seemed to be that Prussia should become the centre of a 
great united Germany to form a bulwark against Russian pos- 
sible aggressions. . . . When Russia conquered Poland our 
poet described how 'Freedom shrieked as Kosciusko fell.' But 
I have lived to hear regrets at the ejection of Russia from 
Poland. It is a wondrous kaleidoscopic jumble." 

A jumble indeed! And who knows where Germany will 
be at the next shake? Says Thackeray in his article on 
The German in England: "It insults every country with 
which it has to deal by absurd assumptions of superiority. 
It threatens all with war, or discord or invasion: it shuts 



THE ABSURD SIDE OF ALLIANCES 227 

up its ports to foreign commerce; and distrusting everyone, 
cheating where it can, bullying where it dares, and insolent 
always, it bewails the unfriendliness of Europe, and com- 
plains of unjust isolation." 

Thackeray was speaking not of Germany but of France — 
the France of 1842! 

And for this France the seeds of distrust lingered on till 
the very eve of the Great War. Witness our shrinking 
from the construction of a Channel Tunnel which would 
have now — free from submarine risk — not only conveyed 
our soldiers to the Continent but subserved the still more 
valuable function of pouring in food from all allied and 
neutral lands in the event of Germany's success in seriously 
interfering with our food-ships. Now we have come 
back to the hugging and kissing, but our countries, alas! 
are still uncoupled. And to think that in a few years 
hence the quadrille will be differently disposed, the Presi- 
dents and the Emperors now devastating each other's 
dominions in implacable enmity will be raising their glasses 
to each other with rhetorical flourishes. 

It is all very like the mentality of schoolboys, among 
whom the thickest comrades are apt to tumble into a period 
of dumb hostility — to be succeeded by a period of enhanced 
appreciation. I can vividly recall the bliss of these recon- 
ciliations when the rosy points of the boycotted pal fused 
into a picture more glowing than ever. Indeed, the whole 
war is reminiscent of a schoolboy scuffle, with each urchin 
crying to the Master: "Please, sir, it wasn't me. He began 
it." It would all be supremely laughable were it not also 
a tragedy too deep for tears. 



THE WAR FOR THE WORDS 

"For with words we govern men." — Lord Beaconsfield 



It is absolutely necessary that 
Russia and England be driven 
from their present unnatural posi- 
tion of power. — Herr Pattai, 
late President of the Austrian 
Chamber of Deputies. 

If we do not accomplish this, 
the war will end without any real 
decision, and peace will not lib- 
erate the world from the perpet- 
ual war-danger with which Eng- 
land and Russia threaten the 
civilized world. — Herr Pattai. 

Unless Belgium is evacuated, 
there will be an appalling era of 
militarism, directed against Ger- 
many. — Bund Neues Vaterland. 

The supreme task of the nego- 
tiators of the settlement must be 
to exterminate not only war it- 
self, which has destroyed whole 
generations, but also the fever 
of armaments. — Herr Ballin in 
Vossische Zeitung. 



If we mean anything by our They must also devise some 

declaration that this is a war sort of assurance that this bloody 
against war, we shall simply be war will not be followed by an 

228 



We shall not sheathe the sword 
... till the military domination 
of Prussia is wholly and finally 
destroyed. . . . — Mr. Asquith. 



No patched-up peace that will 
expose our children to a revival 
of the German menace. — John 
Hodge, M. P., and British 
Statesmen generally. 



Unless Germany is forced out 
of Belgium, all Europe will be 
under the rule of blood and iron. 
— British Press, passim. 

This must be a war to end war. 
—Mr. H. G. Wells. 



THE WAR FOR THE WORDS 



229 



playing the fool if we proceed to 
set up a fiscal system which in- 
evitably makes for ill-will among 
nations. — J. M. Robertson, 
M. P. 



economic war. — Herr Ballin in 
same. 



Belgium, and I will add Serbia, 
must recover all, and more than 
all, they have lost. — Mr. As- 
quith. 



The war was made in Germany. 
— I. Zangwill's Appeal to Neu- 
trals. 



Forty years of preparation for 
the crushing of England. — Brit- 
ish Press, passim. 

No one thought of attacking 
Germany; there was not a meas- 
ure taken by any other Power 
that was not purely defensive; 
the German preparations were 
for attack and were far ahead of 
others on the Continent. — Sir 
Edward Grey. 



With the Germans their own 
natural superiority has become a 



One has never heard anything, 
on the other hand, as to England 
and Japan being willing to give 
up the colonies occupied by 
them. — Vossische Zeitung. 

We did not want this war. — 
Bethmann-Hollweg. 

It was not we who conjured up 
this war. — Count Tisza (Aus- 
tria). 

A programme for the smashing 
of Germany drove her opponents 
into the war. — Hamburger Frem- 
denblatt (Militarist). 

For the last forty-three years 
there has not been a single man 
in the whole domain of Germany, 
who wanted war, not one. . . . 
In England, on the contrary, I 
found during my last visits in 
1907 and 1908 everywhere a 
frightful, blind hatred of Ger- 
many and the impatient expecta- 
tion of a war of annihilation. — 
Housten Chamberlain in The 
Fatherland. 

The dread of Germany's de- 
signs was a delusion, a disastrous 
misunderstanding. — Manifesto of 
150 German Intellectuals. 

The Germans err rather on 
the side of an exaggerated appre- 



230 



THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 



first principle. — G. K. Chester- 
ton in New York American. 



ciation of the merits of other 
nations. — Houston Chamber- 
lain in The Fatherland. 



The fleet is at this moment 
performing not for Britain alone, 
nor yet for Britain's Allies, but 
for the whole world a most im- 
portant part in the drama now 
being played out for the freedom 
of the world. — Mr. Balfour at 
the Empire. 

The Bulwark of the cause of 
man. — Times. 

We and our Allies believe that 
we are fighting to maintain the 
cause of Christ. — The Bishop of 
Norwich. 



Germany is really fighting for 
the whole of Europe when trying 
to break England's rule. — Kol- 
nische V olkszeitung. 

We are fighting for a just cause, 
for freedom, for the right of our 
nation to exist, for a long future 
peace. — The Kaiser. 

We are fighting against a 
Hydra of enemies in a battle for 
our existence and for the liberty 
of the world. — Tsar Ferdinand. 

A war for truth and right, for 
humanity and morality: a war 
for Christianity itself. — Pastor 
Dorrfuss. 



We shall not pause or falter 
till we have assured ... for 
Europe and for the world at large 
their final emancipation from the 
reign of force. — Mr. Asquith. 

Germany's philosophy is that 
a settled peace spells disintegra- 
tion, degeneracy, etc. . . . We 
are fighting this idea. — Sir Ed- 
ward Grey. 



Christmas still finds the peo- 
ples of Europe engaged in the 
sorry task of turning this old and 
beautiful Continent into a heap 
of ruins. — Herr Ballin. 
We have hated war, 
To us it was the nightmare of the 

world 
Alone we bear the load now; 
That eternal peace may come. — 
Bruno Frank: Strophen in Krieg. 



Bryce Report on the Atrocities 
in Belgium. Press Comment on 
the Sinking of the Lusitania, the 
Zeppelin Raids, Bombardment of 
Rheims Cathedral, etc. 



These things are not separate 
acts, but links in the system of 
murder — the question is justified 
whether we can regard such fight- 
ers as being on the same level as 
honorable soldiers and sailors. — 
Lokalanzeiger. 



THE WAR FOR THE WORDS 



231 



A war made up, mainly, ap- 
parently of calculated ferocity, 
shameful and murderous atroc- 
ities. My German neighbors 
were after all, it appears, spies, 
and the stories of a long-planned 
invasion only too true. — Letter 
to Norman Angell, printed in 
War and Peace. 

Then by what right can you 
still pretend, as you have written, 
that you are fighting for the cause 
of liberty and progress? — Ro- 
main Rolland: Open Letter to 
Gerhart Hauptmann. 

The struggle of civilization it- 
self against barbarism. — Berg- 
son. 

The killing of Germans is a 
Divine Service. — Archdeacon 

WlLBERFORCE. 

Germany has violated the 
Hague Conventions by pillage, 
illegal levies, bombarding unde- 
fended towns, torpedoing pas- 
senger vessels, collective penalties 
for individual acts, wanton de- 
struction of artistic buildings, 
etc. — New Statesman. 



The Huns, the baby-killers, 
etc., etc. — British Press, passim. 



Innumerable are the cases in 
which, in the course of this war, 
England has lifted from her face 
that mask of the pioneer for hu- 
man liberty, justice and civiliza- 
tion and shown her true features. 
Compared with the envy and 
greed which has caused a world 
conflagration, how harmless does 
the honest, manly German anger 
against England appear. — 
Pamphlets of "War Committee 
of German industry in Berlin," 
No. 18. The Baralong. 

A war between Germanism and 
barbarism — the logical successor 
of our wars against the Huns. — 
Karl Lamprecht. 

Bayoneting the enemy is serv- 
ing God. — Pastor Schletter. 

It is probable that the English 
are confessing to themselves that 
a war against the German Em- 
pire, even though it be waged 
with a gigantic indecency, with 
robbery, piracy, kidnapping, vio- 
lation of the Red Cross, with flag 
juggling, with assassination and 
butchery of the lowest kind, is no 
good and profitable business. — 
Hamburger Nachrichten. 

We ask in astonishment how 
the policy of a people can sink 
further than the stage which 
England has reached with the 
defence of the Baralong case. — 
Herr Fischbeck in the Reich- 
stag. 



232 



THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 



The Germans have destroyed 
the work of The Hague. With- 
out good faith between the na- 
tions, International Law is im- 
possible. After the treatment of 
Belgium it is impossible to put 
faith again in treaties. — British 
Press, passim. 



The arrest (of the Consuls at 
Salonika) is only one more link 
in the long chain of violations of 
international law perpetrated by 
England and France. — German 
Press, passim. 

We must resume and continue 
the work of the Hague Confer- 
ence. We must do away with all 
prejudices against international 
treaties. It is not brute force 
which can give value to treaties 
but good faith between the na- 
tions that ratified them. — Herr 
Ballin. 



Peace through Victory. (La 
paix par la victoire.) — French 
formula. 



The road to peace lies through 
victory. — Miuichner Neueste 

Nachrichten. 

If our enemies desire the mur- 
der of men and desolation of 
Europe to go on, theirs is the 
blame. — Von Bethmann Holl- 
weg. 



NOVELISTS AND THE WAR 

"There is not a more . . . despised animal than a mere au- 
thor. . . . Your opinion is honest, you will say; then ten to one it is not 
profitable. It is at any rate your own. So much the worse: for then 
it is not the world's." — Hazlitt, On the Aristocracy of Letters. 

From divers quarters one hears grumblings and sneers at 
the intrusion of "novelists" into war questions. Mr. Wells, 
Mr. Shaw, Mr. Bennett, Mr. Jerome, Mr. Galsworthy, 
Mr. Hall Caine, Mr. Chesterton, all flourish their criticisms 
and counsels before a public persuaded that its newspapers 
should only be written by hacks. Few people seem to under- 
stand that the novelist is — with the exception of the Com- 
mander-in-Chief — the most important person for the con- 
duct of a war. England has already paid dearly enough 
for her distrust of the "intellectual," but when even Ger- 
many, which has so marvellously mobilized her men of 
science, has forgotten the novelist, how can we expect 
happy-go-lucky England to realize that without a novelist 
no War Cabinet is complete? Pray do not suspect irony; 
some covert allusion to the inferior fiction of Official Re- 
ports. The argument is plain and straightforward. War 
being not a duel of guns but of the men behind the guns 
and of the people behind the men, it follows that, however 
important it is for Governments to consult the expert in 
explosives, it is still more important for them to consult 
the expert in psychology. This is exactly what the serious 
novelist is — a professor of human nature. His books are 
merely applied psychology, none the less science because 

233 



234 TH E WAR FOR THE WORLD 

it is entertainment. Nobody dissents from Pope's dictum 
that 

" The proper study of mankind is man." 

yet an authority upon man — his habits and ideas, his 
taboos and fetiches — ranks as a scientist below a Fabre 
who studies insects, even when, like Swift, he labors to 
show man quite as mean as the insect. 

It is true Mr. Belloc has an eager following, but this is 
because of his scrupulously stony avoidance of the flesh- 
and-blood aspect of war, for he discourses exclusively, 
like "my uncle Toby," of sectors and salients, of envelop- 
ments and objectives and Polish triangles, presumably 
to cover up his past as a novelist. 

To the novelist human and unashamed the strategy of 
war is not so fascinating as its psychology, as its patho- 
logical problems. There is, for example, the phenome- 
non of "double personality," first diagnosed by Steven- 
son in his classical treatise on Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. 
Under the contagion of the crowd, aided by alcohol, 1 
a modern civilized man, even a professor of ethics, can, it 
appears, pass into "the fighting state" of a primitive 
savage. The admirable Dr. Jekyll had, according to Ste- 
venson, increasing difficulty in dispossessing the deplorable 
Mr. Hyde every time he let him get his foot in. And so we 
find, even when "the fighting state" has subsided, that 

1 "The Austrians," says a correspondent of the Morning Post (February 8, 
1916), writing of the night attacks on the Corso, "are deprived of their 
allowance of water during the day; at night rum is served out to the thirsty 
men, who are then literally driven to the attack in close formation, and 
intoxicated. . . . Some rum-sodden Austrians roll down the mountain-side, 
too intoxicated to keep their feet in the charge! Invariably, the prisoners 
fall into a drunken sleep, and next morning remember nothing of their 
night's adventures." The British ration of rum is given even to teetotalers, 
but as a mere tonic before the charge. According- to the newspapers in 
March, 1916, two million gallons of rum had been purchased for the army so 
far at a cost of £3 23,000. The Germans are said to give ether. 



NOVELISTS AND THE WAR 235 

an officer and a gentleman will write home that his "bag" 
of Germans was so many brace. Nevertheless there is 
reason to hope that with the complete return to civil con- 
ditions the military Hyde disappears. For a French 
manufacturer, some of whose employees came back dis- 
abled, tells me that they have "un trou dans la memoire" 
— a hole in the memory: a sense only of some unreal night- 
mare. Reality is the old workshop. As the deadly poison- 
gas of the Germans may be got by decomposing common 
salt, so the common man may be decomposed into a demon. 
But he returns gladly to his simple table self. This explains 
how retired majors can become the pious pillars of our 
Southern watering-places. 

Similar decompositions appear to be wrought by war 
upon the stay-at-homes. In Germany Eucken, the great 
spiritual teacher, defends his country's crimes. Britons, 
whose proudest boast is that they never shall be slaves, 
vote away Parliament and Magna Charta, and call for 
bureaucracy and the Censor. Yet psychology bids us hope 
that, with the ebbing of war, Eucken will become ethical 
again and Englishmen re-anglicized, though whether we shall 
quite slough our Hyde is a subtle question, which may be 
recommended to the disciples of Mr. Henry James. 

Absorbing as these speculations are, they must yield 
place to the practical questions of the war, for it is in the 
handling of these that the novelist is most needed, though 
least in request. As the economist advises on the effect of 
withdrawing gold, as the general or the journalist reports 
on the sort of shells necessary, so the novelist should advise 
the Government how its measures will affect human nature. 
Thus, if the Germans had had one on their war staff, they 
would never have invaded Belgium and turned England 
into the United Kingdom and our chaos of colonies into 
the British Empire. They would never have sunk the 



236 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

Lusitania and lost America, or executed Nurse Cavell and 
created infinitely more enemy soldiers than she rescued. 
We often hear of the Machiavellian methods of the Ger- 
mans. But Machiavelli was a novelist (he wrote Belphegor 
as well as The Prince), and Machiavelli would have never 
let them in for blunders like that. On the contrary, he 
might have taught them (as he does in his Discourses 
on Titus Livius) "how one humane act availed more with 
the men of Falerii than all the might of the Roman arms"; 
how "cities and provinces into which the instruments 
and engines of war, with every other violence to which men 
resort, have failed to force a way, may be thrown open to a 
single act of tenderness, mercy, chastity or generosity." 
It is the moral taught by the novelist iEsop in his story 
of the trial of strength 'twixt the wind and the sun to divest 
the traveller of his cloak — the finest political fable ever 
written ; it is the teaching of those still more famous Christ- 
mas stories, likewise in Greek, whose paradoxology pro- 
claims that the meek shall inherit the earth. And if the 
Germans would have gained mightily at the moment by 
such a novelist on their war-staff, how much the French 
and British may have lost in the future by neglecting to 
consult a novelist before using colored troops! For the 
effects upon the whites, and the after-effects on the black, 
red, and yellow majorities of the world's population, re- 
quired the gravest expert consideration by color specialists 
as well as by general practitioners of human nature. Rud- 
yard Kipling was available for the Hindoo and Pierre Loti 
for the Senegalese, but I doubt if either was called in by 
his Government. It is not too late, however, to take expert 
opinion on the question of reprisals for the Zeppelin raids. 
Shall we avenge our slaughtered babes by bombing German 
babies? The answer clearly depends upon the effect on 
the Germans. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle has opined that it 



NOVELISTS AND THE WAR 237 

would serve to check the Zeppelins. But he is not an expert 
on Prussian psychology. We need here a German novelist 
— Dr. Ewers, for example. Perhaps, in the difficulty of 
communicating with the enemy, Mr. Ford Madox Huefifer 
would do. And he, I imagine, would testify that the Prus- 
sians would cheerfully sacrifice two German babies to blow 
up one British brat. Not to mention that their Press 
Bureau would presently prove that it was we who began 
this massacre of innocents. Personally I should advise 
dropping Dickens' Christmas Carol on undefended Ger- 
man towns. This combined demonstration of power and 
forbearance might penetrate even the hide of the rhinoce- 
ros (or should it be Rhineoceros?). 

Nor can I believe that the Censorship Bureau is as ex- 
pertly run by nobodies as it would be by novelists. These 
forty blue-pencilling gentlemen— forty fooling like one — 
can they really appraise the precise effect, say, of the 
repercussion on Russia of the elimination from British 
journalism of everything except a purring satisfaction with 
the Russian bureaucracy? Does it really tend to make the 
Russian people more anxious for victory? 

But by far the most important of the questions that 
call for the novelist is the popular demand for the extirpa- 
tion of Prussian militarism as a condition precedent to 
peace, as indeed the only way to avoid a ''premature" 
or "an inconclusive peace." Of course, if this means root- 
ing out the Prussians, it is a military question on which 
the novelist must not presume to offer an opinion, and if 
the military experts assure me that with the forces at our 
disposal, and despite the accessory hordes of Austrians, 
Bulgarians, and Turks, we can wipe out sixty-seven millions 
of the stoutest fighting stock on earth, or at least render 
it impotent to reproduce its martial strain, I can only ex- 
press my satisfaction. But if it means that we are to force 



238 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

a change of heart upon Germany, so that she purge herself 
from within of her militarism, then as a novelist I must 
regretfully report that this can never be done by castigation. 
For in order that the chastised party may be converted he 
must be conscious of his guilt. A clerk caught forging, 
a schoolboy caught cribbing, may draw the conclusion, as 
they writhe under the judge or the rod, that cheating never 
prospers. But a suffragette caught window-breaking had 
a feeling of injury, not guilt, and her punishment only 
enhanced her sense of saintliness. Did the Germans feel 
that they had drowned the world in tears and blood for 
mere lust of domination, then punishment would seem to 
them a righteous nemesis and they would turn from their 
idolatry of force. But so far from feeling guilty they look 
upon themselves as a nation of martyrs: holy innocents 
assailed by a combination of all the white and colored 
devils of the world, jealous of their culture and their com- 
merce. To our cry of "Prussian militarism" they oppose 
"British navalism" — the dictatorial might of our Grand 
Fleet, with its 2,300 subsidiary vessels. The Bryce Report 
on Belgium they counter with equally official documents 
on the Russians in Poland or the Turcos in France. "Noth- 
ing, " says the Kolnische Volkszeitung, "can ever wash out 
of the conscience of the English Government the war with 
all its horrors," whilst "the case for Germany," according 
to a writer in the Fatherland, has "the grandeur of a mighty 
crusade, the sanctification of a sacrificial cause, the glory 
of a vast and universal ideal." 

Against such a state of mind — aggravated as it is by 
Germany's crafty introduction of civilization into the 
conquered parts of Russia — force is powerless. The more 
the Germans are crushed, the more holy and innocent they 
will feel, the more sternly they will brace themselves to 
build up their army afresh. As the blood of the martyrs 



NOVELISTS AND THE WAR 239 

is the seed of the Church, so punishment would only be 
the seed of a new and still mightier Germany. And hence 
the conversion of Christmas x to Christianity, by consecrat- 
ing it to a Conference of the Belligerents for a belated peace, 
might be more fatal to militarism than all the military 
victories we promise ourselves. 

But "I am encroaching upon religion, and the novelist — 
no less than the bishop — must confine himself to mundane 
considerations when he touches on war. He has not even 
the bishop's privilege of blessing the war. He remains a 
simple student of its psychology, zealous to impart his 
wisdom at his country's call. 

1 This was originally published in the Christmas number of the Herald for 
1915- 



WALKING IN WAR-TIME 

"Give me the clear blue sky over my head, and the green turf be- 
neath my feet, a winding road before me, and a three hours' march to 
dinner . . . and to be known by no other name than the Gentleman 
in the parlor." — Hazlitt. 

"How do I get to Bourton-on-the-Hill? " 

The brawny farm-lounger looked at me with an ingratiat- 
ing smile. 

"How much will you give me to tell you?" 

I was taken aback. In a goodly experience of tramping 
my native land I had never been asked for money before 
by any human finger-post. "You surely don't want to be 
paid?" I gasped. But perhaps — I was thinking — so con- 
torted a route, which had already been given me in terms of 
fish-ponds, a private drive, swans, a house with a cupola, 
white gates, and half-invisible footpaths, made an abnor- 
mal tax upon one's instructor. 

"Why not?" he answered with another Alice-like rep- 
artee. "I'm a stud-groom." Ultimately — though he 
never learnt my name — he turned into a special constable, 
who had been trying to test if the "German spy" thought 
the information worth buying. But he candidly admitted 
he did not see the military advantage to the invader of 
learning the way to the sleepy Gloucester village, and for 
the excellent chart he contributed to my note-book he 
refused the tip. 

Nearer the danger-zone one does not come off so easily. 
On the East Coast I have fluttered the farmyards and sent 
the ploughboys speeding for miles on their cycles to the 

240 



WALKING IN WAR-TIME 24 1 

nearest police station. "They says you were looking 
round," explained the panting Dogberry as he demanded 
my papers. The West Coast is only less vigilant. "Be you 
a German spy, zur?" anxiously asked a raw recruit, com- 
mencing sentinel. 

"Medio tutissimus ibis" — keep to the Middle Coun- 
ties — is my advice to the knights of the knapsack. In the 
more military areas it is terrifying — and illuminating — to 
mark how everything can be transformed under espionitis. 
Walking slowly, you are spying; briskly, you are fleeing. 
To tie your shoestring near a bridge, viaduct, or culvert is 
absolutely prohibited by the Defence of the Realm Act. 
Asking the way is suspicious, knowing it still more so. Con- 
sulting your road-map is flagrantly hostile, taking a nature- 
note treasonable. A book is a code, a manuscript a report, 
a sketch a chart, accounts statistics, a scrawl a cypher, an 
electric torch a wireless installation, a Kodak death and 
damnation. Your haversack holds bombs, your card-case 
somebody else's cards; your very passport is no proof you 
have not murdered the owner. A beard is glaringly false: 
beardlessness a shaven mask. If your purse is full it is with 
the wages of Judas, if you have but little money you are 
doubtless out to make it. To tender gold is to damage 
British credit; your paper is probably forged. Gossiping 
with the cottagers is extracting information, giving pennies 
to their children is bribery and corruption. To smoke is to 
reek of the Fatherland, to eschew tobacco the last sacrifice 
of the Prussian patriot, to light your pipe at night is to 
escort a Zeppelin. Is your name as Saxon as Alfred or 
Athelstan — it is clearly assumed. Does it begin with a Z? 
You are obviously the cousin of a notorious Count. You 
may not whistle — that is a call; nor sing — for that is a 
password. If you look up you are awaiting airmen and if 
you look down you are avoiding men's eyes; as for looking 



242 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

round, we have seen what comes of that. Blowing your 
nose you are signalling with a handkerchief; swinging your 
stick, you are a semaphore; feeding pigeons may bring you 
to the gallows. Quaffing at the village pump, you are 
pumping it on the water supply. Conversing with the 
village idiot, you are in the Intelligence Department of 
Berlin. Quoting your newspaper, you are probably "spread- 
ing a false report." Rambling idly, you may be coming too 
near a "specified area" or you may be out at too late an 
hour without a permit in writing. Who knows that the 
bun that bulges your pocket is not a bomb? Particularly 
parlous is it to telephone : to telegraph requires an arduous 
avoidance of dangerous ambiguities. "Back to-night. 
Don't wait up" is clearly a warning to submarines. "Tell 
Willy all is arranged" may be a message to one's Imperial 
master. "Please return to London and let the matter 
drop" is an unmistakable instruction to Zeppelins. To 
refer to Burns or Shelley would be fatal. 

But even in the hub of England, far from military or 
naval bases or buzzing bombardiers, the amateur tramp 
finds himself begirt by novel conditions. The professional 
tramp has vanished from the roads, whether from the 
difficulty of pitching a plausible tale of out-of-work, whether 
because, like the criminal proper, he has enlisted. Soldiers 
jostle you at every turn — some superb types of manhood, 
bronzed and stalwart, others pitiably puny and puerile. 1 
The horizon is clouded with khaki, if not with majors — 
khaki strolling, khaki galloping, khaki cycling, khaki 
motor-cycling, khaki motoring, khaki driving lorries. It 
makes day bright with its bugles and sleep impossible with 
its munition wagons. It fills the roads with dust and the 
inns with life. It crowds the bars, absorbs the dining- 
tables, occupies the beds, congests the cathedrals. There 

1 See Appendix, p. 248. 



WALKING IN WAR-TIME 243 

never was, I fancy, such a "Merry England." The war is, 
after all, a great gay adventure. The white tents gleam in 
an atmosphere of picnic. Everywhere tongues clack, 
throats sing, bands blare, drinks fizz, billiard balls rattle. 
We ought to invite a specially conducted party of real Ger- 
man spies to see "panic-stricken Britain." The English 
may take their pleasures sadly: they certainly take their 
corpses cheerfully. But, then, true religion is always 
joyous — and the real religion of England, as of most coun- 
tries, is patriotism. Listening to the preachers, it is difficult 
to escape the conviction that Christ was in the army and 
the Madonna made munitions. 

I came into Winchester of a Saturday night through a 
swollen but sluggish stream of soldiery, that overflowed the 
High Street. A rare quadruped tried feebly to assert its 
right to the roadway: one saw it almost whelmed in the 
yellow flood. It was, in fact — that night — 

" Khaki, khaki, everywhere 
And not a drop to drink." 

For at nine the bars close: even for the civilian in his own 
hotel — a piece of the Act I do not profess to understand, but 
which is Solomon and Solon combined compared with the 
total closing of lonely roadside inns between two and six. 
For this is what I found ten long miles from a military 
camp. Arriving at the only inn for some hours, after toiling 
all the morning in the hot sun, it seemed impossible to get 
even bread and water. "Closed till six" announced a plac- 
ard, with Prussian firmness, and it was only ten minutes 
past two. Happily the English are not yet quite Prussian — 
"verboten" is not yet an ultimatum. By a side-door I 
managed to sidle into a kitchen, and by casuistry, aided by 
coins, I achieved some cheese-biscuits, while the landlord, 
with a providential inspiration, suggested that cider was 



244 THE WAR F0R THE WORLD 

" non-alcoholic." Pleasant and popular fiction. But why 
the poor pedestrian should be starved is one of the many 
mysteries of the War Office. It looks as if the Government 
had fallen in with the degenerate view of innkeepers that 
their business is to provide liquids and not solids. As if it 
were not a sufficient drawback to rural Britain that bread 
and cheese is your only pabulum. 

My host, for once afraid I might not be a German spy, 
but a British bloodhound on the track of publicans and 
sinners, was depressed and oracular. He was a long, lean, 
untidy man, and the wisdom of the War Office weighed on 
him. "This war won't finish by fighting," he said gloomily. 
"By exhaustion." 

The retreat of the Russian S team-Roller found its ex- 
planation at the mouth of another bar-oracle. "What did 
you expect? You can't win a war on temperance!" Ev- 
idently the abolition of vodka rankles in the British breast — 
the Russian Alliance is no longer above criticism. They will 
be touching the beer-barrel next : already, indeed, a hand has 
been nearly laid on its sacred staves. That British beer 
would win over lager I never heard doubted, though not a 
few sighed for the end of the war, mainly on commercial 
grounds. Thus the fishmonger lamented the falling-off 
due to the prodigal leavings of the billeted — the whole 
town fed from their crumbs. Thus the farmer deplored the 
loss of labor. After being apprised the soldiers might be 
hired for agricultural work, he had wasted a week in corre- 
spondence, only to be told — too late — that this particular 
regiment could not be had. (Laudation of the War Office 
may be heard in Heaven — I have never come across it on 
earth.) But there were not wanting buxom landladies with 
soft hearts, who could not bear to see the young fellows go 
off — "and come back their own skeletons." The only 
blood-lust came from the prosperous classes, from elderly 



WALKING IN WAR-TIME 245 

civilians comfortably ensconced in central British boarding- 
houses. These were all resolved to fight to the last school- 
boy. Not so khaki. It was frankly bored. "Fed up!" 
said an officer, formerly of the Manchester Cotton Ex- 
change. "Nigh a twelvemonth of drill and not yet got our 
real rifles. Conscription? The front is choked with men. 
Loth to return to indoor work? Don't you believe it! 
Soldiering is beastly dull." 

But even the ubiquitous khaki could not really produce 
the impression of a country at war. In the towns all was 
bustle and life; in the fields and woods the pomp of summer 
denied death. The corn grew golden in the meadows, the 
great sunny sheep-dotted spaces, relieved by mellow thatch 
and tile and gray church-tower, drowsed under the blue 
sky, to which larks rose, chanting the paean of all this holy 
peace. If there was a scarcity of labor, it only added to the 
tranquillity; if I saw the mistress of a celebrated school 
gleaning in her own meadow, that only enhanced the idyll. 
The appearance of a war correspondent at a great Midland 
pleasure-city, with films from the front, did not beguile the 
Boanerges of the boarding-houses from the promenade 
concert. Lolling over five rows of stalls, in a spacious 
solitude, I beheld the ruin wrought by the German bombs. 
After two hours of pictorial havoc and platform indignation, 
it required an effort to remember that British bombs are not 
exactly creative. 

Theatrical Warfare 

"To-morrow night," said the Strolling Player in a breath- 
less gush, "we shall perform that great military drama, 
played throughout the entire North of England, called 
'Man and Wife,' and showing how the Englishwoman, 
married to a German, refused to betray her country. We 



246 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

will now proceed to entertain you with singing and dancing 
and the whole will conclude with the screaming farce of 
'The Doctor's Visit.'" It was at Chipping Campden, 
in a Portable Repertory Theatre, pitched in a field. But, 
alas! delectable as is Chipping Campden and the archi- 
tecture thereof, I could not wait for the great war-drama, 
and the melodrama which began the bloated programme — 
like the farce which wound it up — was as remote from the 
war as from reality. In Turkey they have proclaimed a 
holy war, and in England that the war is holy. Yet this is 
what we chorused with shrieks and giggles, in the heart of 
England and nature — in the great white tent under the 
harvest moon — 

" She's got a face like a pork-pie cut 

In pieces 

With creases: 
She said, ' Kiss me,' but 
I cried 'Tut! Tut!' 
Tooral, looral, lay! " 

It is perhaps no worse than in London, where you have 
to pay more than 9d. for your stall. And to one constantly 
depressed by our theatrical fare, it was a gleam of comfort 
to come — in a suburb of Worcester — upon a cinema ad- 
vertising "William Shakespeare, the Greatest Work of the 
Age." One forgave a certain confusion between the great- 
ness of Shakespeare and the greatness of this particular 
picture-drama. But it was disappointing to find that it 
turned on Shakespeare's rise to fame and riches. This is 
indeed a British Shakespeare, by no means the one made in 
Germany. Nevertheless the programme opened up poetic 
vistas. "Born 1564, died 1661." A Shakespeare of 97 
sets one dreaming. What might the hoary Bard of Avon, 
not have given us, nonagenarian Hamlets, octogenarian 



WALKING IN WAR-TIME 247 

Othellos! Alas! the printer has transposed the figures, 
and 16 16 reminds us wistfully of the tribute that was to 
have celebrated the third centenary of his passing — the 
homage of a united world. Yes, if only for Shakespeare's 
sake, we must get the war over by 191 6. 



APPENDIX 

This article, with its one word on the puniness of some of 
our soldiers, was strangely represented by an hysterical Amer- 
ican correspondent as sneering at the army. The reference to 
the enlistment of criminals was taken as implying that all re- 
cruits were criminals! Since it was published, both Press and 
Parliament have resounded with the scandal of the original 
recruiting in which the incredible error seems to have been 
committed of paying doctors half-a-crown for each man they 
passed, with the result that now the Government is seriously 
embarrassed at the claim for pensions on the part of many in- 
valids who only joined to get into the military hospital or for 
a rest-cure or the pension. On the appearance of the attack 
upon me, an Army doctor at the Aldershot hospital wrote to 
me a report of the "extraordinary number of cases of tramps, 
lunatics, and incurables recruited" that had come under his 
own treatment, including two one-legged men, two cases of ad- 
vanced cancer of the stomach (both died within six weeks of 
enlistment, and one had a tumor visible several yards off), cases 
of semi-blindness, innumerable cases of advanced phthisis (the 
patient very often admitted at the point of death), "innumer- 
able cases of the refuse of workhouse infirmaries, senile, tooth- 
less and decrepit old men, who enlist as forty-five, are really 
fifty-six to fifty-nine, and look over seventy." These, he says, 
"die off like flies in a cold snap." "One boy," he adds, "told 
me that he had been three times in a sanatorium." When I 
reproached him for now giving us this trouble, he retorted 
civilly, "Sir, I know that very well, but a young chap can't 
walk about in civilian clothes nowadays. The sergeants make 
his life a misery! " He was right and I begged his pardon! 

As to lunatics, says my authority, "it appears to be the thing 
in Ireland to get the family idiot into the Army and subse- 

248 



APPENDIX 249 

quently to protest vehemently he is the sole support." Few 
of these cases are "dangerous " but they are in some cases " quite 
unable to tell their names and are found wandering." 

"There is an odd and sinister significance," says the Observer, 
reviewing Mr. Holmes's book My Police Court Friends with 
the Colors, " in the fact that some of the heroes of the great cam- 
paign have made their only previous public appearance in the 
police-court." The only "sinister significance" is the stupidity 
of society in having so mishandled the criminal, who is like 
mud, merely "matter in the wrong place" in our civilization, 
but whose virtues find their full appraisal in the fighting line. So 
too France has now extracted heroic service from the youth of 
her Penitentiary Colonies. 

"When the enterprising burglar's not a-burgling" he is throw- 
ing bombs in Flanders, and receiving stolen property from the 
Huns, it appears from the Daily News (December 17, 1915), 
which gives us also a pleasing picture of the Central Criminal 
Court, which had just finished the shortest session on record. 
The Judge's Court — the famous No. 1 — had been previously 
closed for some days. According to the Times the decrease in 
crime has brought about a reduction in the prison estimates of 
£100,000, and a score of jails have been closed wholly or in 
part. "Judges," said Mr. Justice Horridge at the Notts Assizes, 
"go from place to place, finding little or no crime to deal with." 



ON CATCHING UP A LIE 

I owe to the courtesy of an evening paper the opportunity 
of scotching further — killed it never can be — the He circu- 
lated by a New York correspondent of a Sunday paper that 
I had "sold and published" a two-column sneer at the 
British Army in a great "pro-German" American paper, 
stabbing my country, so to speak, in the back, and in the 
dark, and for thirty pieces of silver. When I say that the 
"pro-German" paper has published an attack from my pen 
on Prussian militarism, and publishes every week an article 
by Mr. G. K. Chesterton as well as many from Kipling, 
Belloc, and that the article now indicted appeared simul- 
taneously in the Daily Chronicle (to an unqualified chorus 
of approval), and that so far from sneering at the British 
Army it is to be given in French by the Revue de France to 
amuse our Ally, it will be seen that the libel was tolerably 
complete. 

And yet, as I have said, it bears a charmed life. It has 
set out round the world, 1 and — with a week's start — can 
never be overtaken. In vain the Sunday paper has expressed 
its regret; its readers are not observers. Some will have 
seen the lie and not the contradiction, others the contra- 
diction and not the libel. I did not even see it myself, 
though I glanced through the paper for the more official 
war-lies, and though it was headed in large capitals: "Why 
is Mr. Zangwill Allowed?" (The answer to B rudder Bones 
is, I suppose, "Because he will not be silent.") 

My first intimation of the libel came from a neighbor 
1 1 last met it in a great Australian newspaper. 
250 



ON CATCHING UP A LIE 25 1 

and of its seriousness from a dismayed friend who wrote: 
"I hear that at the dinner that was given to Beerbohm 
Tree last night it was the subject of a good deal of disagree- 
able talk." That great British actor having sailed for the 
States before the falsehood was exposed, we perceive how 
the seed of error might be indefinitely and innocently scat- 
tered. Nothing would surprise me less, if the next time I 
have a piece at a theatre a gentleman in the gallery hisses 
to avenge England — to the great relief of the critics, thus 
given a cue for their aesthetic principles. It is true the 
Sunday paper has asked the journals that copied its accu- 
sation to copy its correction. But few will do anything 
so foolish, and even legal compulsion cannot extend to 
the withdrawal of statements of my demerits, which are 
not necessarily untrue because I omitted to sneer at the 
British Army. Why should these journals withdraw their 
whips and scorpions merely because there was no crime to 
chastise? If I know newspaper nature, they will not, and 
the only journal I have looked into bears out my foresight, 
for it corrects its account but not its abuse. Nor will the 
anonymous patriots who obscenely reviled my race on 
postcards now write to congratulate me on it. 

No; a He once loosed is a mephitic vapor that, unlike 
the Arabian jinn, can never be got back into its bottle. 

But how came the journalist to loose the lie? 

He was suffering, I take it, from pro-Germania — a malady 
akin to that diagnosed in my very article as espionitis. 
The unhappy victim scents pro-Germanism in every writer 
who deviates by a hair-breadth from the stupidest view of 
the greatest number. And if to loathe Prussia and all her 
works; if to watch with patriotic grief the Prussianizing of 
England; if to dread — as I see Magna Charta, Parliament, 
the Press, all her great historic landmarks, disappearing — 
that our young men who have gone out to fight for Eng- 



252 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

land will find no England to return to; if to hold that the 
duty of us who are beyond the age for foreign service is to go 
to the front for the defence of England against her home- 
born Huns, and to preserve England for her absent sons; if 
this be pro- Germanism, then I must assuredly be written 
down a pro- German! 

But it is not even necessary to watch over England — the 
simplest guardianship of reason, of justice, of the sense of 
humor, is pro-German: as if to the diseased logic of the 
afflicted patriot, reason, justice, and humor were German! 
Breathe one syllable suggesting that France, Russia, Bel- 
gium, Italy, Serbia, Montenegro, or Japan (with power to 
add to their number) are not academies of archangels, 
and you are equally pro-German. There was a moment — 
with Bulgaria balancing— when Sofia too was a holy city, 
though finally Tzar Ferdinand had a Jewish nose. Who 
would dare to say to-day what the Westminster said then 
— that Bulgaria was the great peasant democracy? That 
would be pro-German. 

Fairness, in short, is the mark of the beast. My libellist 
confesses it openly. "A judicial frame of mind" he classes 
under "German propaganda." The Americans do not 
understand it, this "Observer" tells us. "To be fair to an 
opponent argues weakness in one's own case." What a 
standard ! 

The true British patriot must assert that the German 
gray is jet-black and the British Gray snow-white. I fear 
color-blindness is not my forte. But I thought if there was 
one thing John Bull prided himself on it was fairness. Does 
the ideal hold good then only for sport? Is it unimportant 
that a thing is "not cricket" the moment the thing is im- 
portant? My wise woman writes to me: "We have be- 
fogged ourselves with talk of our Governing Class instead 
of asking ourselves if they could really govern, and have 



ON CATCHING UP A LIE 253 

prattled about the Traditions of our Public Schools instead 
of asking if the traditions of schoolboys were the last word 
necessary in conducting modern life." Let us at least not 
throw away the one jewelled word in their traditions, 
Fairplay, when we have to face adult problems, issues 
affecting the whole future of humanity! 

Where was our Public School tradition when our scien- 
tists and scholars shamelessly turned and rent German 
scholarship and science, to which they had all their lives 
paid homage? Was it "cricket" when we hastened to 
anticipate with jeers and accusations of theatricality the 
Kaiser's rumored design to re-create the kingdom of Poland, 
though we had made the welkin ring with cheers for the 
Tzar's precisely identical proposal? Why make Turkey's 
German ally responsible for the Armenian massacres, 
which she could have stopped by a word, but hold England 
blameless for Russia's anti- Jewish pogroms? 

It is true the Germans have not "played the game" 
either, have indeed played it foully, opening up still lower 
circles in the Inferno of war. But this is no reason why 
we should copy their spiritual poison-gas, however the 
devil of military necessity drive us to copy their chlorine. 
What military advantage is there in denying their achieve- 
ments, caricaturing their motives, and embellishing our 
own? 

This is the true "fog of war" — that we no longer see 
each other, that we hack blindly in the dark at the mon- 
strous images we have made of each other. The German 
crimes are largely the outcome of an inhuman logic pushed 
to extremes by a panic fear, 1 and the bulk of the Germans 

1 "It was fear, not ambition, that had led even pacifist Germans to support 
the present war" (Presidential Address of the Headmasters' Association, 
January 4, 1916.) This fear was largely due to Mr. Asquith's formula, of an 
apparent intransigence unknown since Cato. The Germans, having no 
humor, have failed to note that the House of Lords still exists, and has even 



2 54 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

are no more responsible for them than you or I for the 
deaths in the Dardanelles. When we last caught sight of 
their faces — on Christmas Eve in the trenches — what was 
there but the lineaments of our common, our poor, pitiful 
humanity? 

served as a Radical check upon Asquith's autocracy, meeting when the 
House of Commons was holiday-making. 



PATRIOTISM AND PERCENTAGE 

"Patriotism is the last refuge of a Tariff -Reformer." — Dr. Johnson 
(with apologies) . 

(Originally published in 1904) 

Readers who merely desire to beguile a tedious air- 
journey, no less than serious students of history, may be 
safely counselled to procure Li Hang Li's new work. Sixty 
Celestial Centuries, for our accomplished academician is 
never dull, not even for a century. Peculiarly suggestive 
are the early chapters in which he recounts the Tariff War 
provoked by the Lord Chamberlain of England (thereafter 
known as the Lord Protector), and traces the inevitable 
rise of China, as the greatest collection of customers the 
world had ever seen, to the hegemony of the competing 
tradespeoples. Now that mankind is peacefully gathered 
under the great Chinese umbrella, there is a fascination 
in reviewing these 

*' Old unhappy far-off things, 
And battles long ago," 

and for the literary antiquarian the pensive pleasure is 
enhanced when he lights upon such a passage as that in 
which Li Hang Li tells how the War of Tariffs was carried 
into the domain of the spirit. It would appear that the 
Lord Chamberlain (or Jo) was not actually first in the 
field, though his Tyrtaean speeches practically operated 
as a heavy tax upon the patience of other peoples. The 
first tangible blow in that long campaign which devastated 



256 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

the mediaeval world, was struck by the Monroe States of 
North and South America, already armed with a crippling 
duty on foreign works of art, calculated to protect the 
American citizen against the influences of Beauty, and 
with a formidable Copyright Law, by which only the strong- 
est exotic authors could achieve entry. The blow was as 
cunning as it was crushing. A sudden and simple extension 
was given to the Law totally prohibiting the importation of 
contract-labor, and all foreign actors and theatrical troupes 
were turned back at the Custom House. Sara Bernhardt 
and Mrs. Siddons, David Garrick and Sir Charles Wynd- 
ham, Coquelin and Moliere, Duse and Blondin, all — says 
Li Hang Li — were treated with impartial injustice, and 
after a few days of detention on Ellis Island were shipped 
back to their homes, sandwiched between emigrants re- 
jected for having come with a labor-contract, and emigrants 
rejected for having come without any prospect of one. 
The closing of American ports to these celebrities was 
naturally accompanied by the vigorous manufacture of 
native talent. A host of Press-agents arose of unparalleled 
activity and imagination, and soon the home-market was 
stocked with autocthonous tragedians and comedians of 
the highest brands. The fall in the price of theatre tickets 
that followed was a complete exposure of the Free Trade 
fallacy, the consumer actually paying less for his celebri- 
ties. It is true that the American theatrical archives seem 
to chronicle the subsequent performances of a number of 
English actors, and more particularly English actresses, 
but these, as Li Hang Li surmises, may have entered un- 
taxed, under the head of raw material. So successful was 
this measure that it was extended to musicians, and even 
to preachers and lecturers, and as these rejected immigrants 
were one and all repatriated at the expense of the Shipping 
Companies, a new terror was added to the Atlantic by the 



PATRIOTISM AND PERCENTAGE 257 

Company's Inspector. The examination of the passengers 
for any trace of genius proved an irksome preliminary to 
the purchase of tickets. Harmless old cheesemongers with 
prophetic beards were kept back on suspicion; respectable 
widows with dyed hair were refused cabins as Tragic Muses; 
while a Cockney accent and diamonds were sufficient to 
discredit an innocent barmaid as a comedienne. In the 
European panic that followed this Draconian enactment — a 
panic especially severe in Bohemia — many artists, Italian 
and Polish, no less than Bohemian, mostly singers, pianists, 
and fiddlers, declared themselves of American birth, and 
passed triumphantly through the barrier. Their triumph, 
however, was of short duration; for their foreign names 
had been confiscated at the Custom House, and this loss 
of reputation left them performing to empty benches. A 
famous pianist, who had smuggled himself in by having 
his hair cut, found his audience melting away as he played, 
unable to penetrate through his disguise. 

The Retaliation policy of Europe was prompt but for 
the most part inefficacious. England's exclusion of Ameri- 
can spelling was evaded by the printing of an Encyclopaedia 
Britannica from old British plates. The impost upon the 
cake-walk in France was a negligible source of revenue 
outside Paris. More galling was the heavy duty levied by 
Germany upon Transatlantic reputations, forty per cent 
being deducted from the scholars, and fifty from the soldiers. 
But the crushing ad valorem duty imposed by the Conti- 
nental Zollverein upon English editions of Baedeker served 
mainly to benefit Italy, as the country most overrun by 
the American tourist. It says much for the anti-American 
ardor of Britain, that she should have consented to a tax 
that pressed so hardly upon her own pilgrims; but the 
mediaeval Briton never seems to have minded cutting off 
his nose in the interests of universal ugliness. As Li Hang 



258 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

Li pithily remarks, the Bull in a China shop ever does 
more damage to others than good to himself. These Euro- 
pean reprisals but provoked an American embargo upon 
foreign plays, and by the aid of a Bounty indigenous Ibsens 
and home-grown Hauptmanns were fostered, and a goodly 
crop of gloomy dramas was produced, winch, although 
exported to Japan under a preferential tariff, seem to have 
mainly returned with a drawback. It is interesting to 
learn that exception was everywhere made in favor of 
Musical Comedies, respecting which — as a necessity of 
Life — all mediaeval nations appear to have practiced Reci- 
procity. 

The exclusion of European novels followed in natural 
sequence, whether in their own tongues or in American. 
Even pirated editions no longer had the protection of the 
American law. The great gain in public decency that 
ensued led to the prohibition of non-American characters 
in native work. 

The selection of Paris or Florence as the scene of action 
for American heroines was likewise prohibited to the native 
novelist, even when he lived in Europe, and all bookstores 
hiving such hybrid fiction were liable to be raided by the 
police. The French accent was forbidden in quotations 
in Congress, and World Fairs were abolished in favor of 
Pan-American Exhibitions. These statesmanlike measures 
served to fan the feeble spark of American self-conscious- 
ness, and to nurse the young patriotism to a less apologetic 
assertiveness. 

The over-production of local color, and the glut in his- 
toric romance, were but temporary evils of the home mar- 
ket, due to the action of Publishing Trusts, and the exporta- 
tion to the new markets in Cuba and the Philippines served 
to relieve the congestion. It was in vain that England 
retaliated by prohibiting American humor; it was cabled 



PATRIOTISM AND PERCENTAGE 259 

over as news, and even penetrated as after-dinner speeches. 
Beaten in the battle of the books, England fell back on 
forbidding the entry of American heiresses into the peerage. 
This feeble and irrelevant measure had an unexpected 
consequence. The Monroe States discovered that they 
could manufacture their own peers, at far less cost and 
with the latest improvements. Dukes and Earls were 
turned out at Washington, and polished at a culture- 
factory in the suburbs of Boston. They were in high de- 
mand for home consumption, and the output could hardly 
keep pace with the orders from Chicago and San Francisco. 
But to follow the learned Li Hang Li into this section of his 
history would take me too far. I wish, however, I had 
space to quote from his chapter on "The Corner in Counts." 
I have been reading another of Li Hang Li's fascinating 
chapters on mediaeval history. The author of Sixty Celestial 
Centuries is at his profoundest in dealing with the curious 
confusion of thought and life which characterized the 
Western world at the period of the first Russo-Japanese 
war. The Flowery Philosopher draws an instructive 
parallel between that self-contradictory century and the 
early centuries of the Christian Church, when the European 
barbarians, lacking the consistent doctrine of Confucius, 
found themselves torn between two opposite teachings, 
the ancient militarism and the new gospel of turning the 
other cheek. It needed, he points out, all the ingenuity 
of the Fathers, to reconcile Bloodshed and Brotherhood, 
and in the last extremity the Church was compelled to de- 
mand penance from those who had murdered, even for the 
highest objects and in the most glittering costumes. The 
contradiction of Church and Camp lost its acuteness with 
the habit of the ages, and ended — says Li Hang Li — in 
Christianity wearing its pigtail both in front and behind 
without any sense of incongruity. The Church blessed 



260 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

the banners of the departing warriors, and even the lay 
world grew to think that it was only for the extension of 
Christianity that wars were ever waged at all. 

But scarcely had custom dulled the edge of this incon- 
sistency, says our historian, when another self-contradiction 
began to grow glaring. A greater force than Christianity 
had arisen to divide the human heart against itself — the 
force of Percentage. Poor weltering barbarians — Li Hang 
Li pauses to meditate — we Chinese were feeble and en- 
gaged in washing the dirty linen of the West, but at least 
we were spared those internal contradictions which dis- 
tract the soul of a people and render it incapable of philo- 
sophic fruits. 

At first it looked, indeed, as if the development of inter- 
national finance and the Joint-Stock Company was making 
uninterruptedly for the abolition of war and would bring 
to the rest of the world the brotherhood already established 
among a third of its inhabitants — the four hundred mil- 
lions of our mediaeval China. It seemed as if the profits 
might succeed where the prophets had failed. The Hebrew 
Bible — which was read on Sundays when the barbarians 
reposed themselves from life — had predicted that mankind 
would beat their swords into ploughshares. What seemed 
more imminent was their beating them into Bourse shares. 
There was no nation which did not take the kindliest 
interest in the concerns of every other. Was there a coun- 
try in need of a railway? The whole Western world co- 
operated to build it. Not alone the rich, but the smallest 
tradespeople hastened to contribute their oboli to the 
good work. Widows gave their mites, orphans — with a 
filial piety almost Chinese — threw upon the treasure-heap 
the savings of their fathers' lifetimes. Clergymen, for once 
collaborating in the work of peace and good-will, were the 
keenest to assist in these international operations. These 



PATRIOTISM AND PERCENTAGE 26 1 

brotherly societies built harbors where there had been only- 
rocks; they irrigated lands where only weeds had thriven, 
and called into being new and nourishing communities. 
No soil was too remote, no people too alien for the workings 
of this cosmopolitan beneficence. No territory so barren 
but the human brotherhood was ready to rush to its help, 
train its people, develop its industries and its commerce, 
insure it against fire, provide it with every necessity and 
educate it to every luxury. Such was the state of mind to 
which the West had advanced in its slow progression toward 
our Eastern perfection. The ancient attitude of being 
hostile to every other country, envious of every other Power, 
seemed outgrown and obsolete, and all men appeared to 
seek their own good in all mankind's. Humanity bade fair 
to be finally united by Bonds issued at five per cent. 

But alas! these barbarians were still savages, and the old 
ideals persisted. Like a sloughing snake, the West lay 
sickening: the new skin of commercialism only half put 
forth, the old skin of militarism only half put off. A truly 
piebald monster, this boasted civilization of theirs. On the 
one hand a federation of peoples eagerly strengthening one 
another, on the other hand packs of peoples jealously 
snapping at one another. A sextet of nations styling them- 
selves Great Powers, all with vast capitals invested in 
developing one another's resources, were yet feverishly 
occupied in watching and cramping the faintest extension 
of one another's dominions. A more ironic situation had 
never been presented in human history, not even when 
Christianity was at its apogee. For whereas, says Li 
Hang Li, in the contest between church and camp, it was 
simple enough to shelve the Sermon on the Mount, in the 
contest between commerce and camp, both factors were of 
equal vitality and insistence. The results of this shock of 
opposite forces of development were paradoxical, farcical 



262 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

even. In the ancient world there has been the same struggle 
for supremacy, but the Babylonians or the Egyptians did 
not build up each other's greatness. The Romans did not 
lend money to the Carthaginians, nor did Hannibal sell 
the Romans elephants. But in this era the nations fought 
by taking up one another's war loans. In lulls of peace they 
built for one another the ships they would presently be 
bombarding one another with. 1 The ancient mistress of 
the world never developed a country till it belonged to 
Rome. The mediaeval rival mistresses were all engaged in 
developing countries which belonged to their rivals or to 
which they might one day themselves belong. In brief, 
two threads of social evolution had got tangled up and tied 
into a knot so that neither thread could be followed clearly. 
It was death to give away your country's fortifications to 
another country, but an easy life to contribute to the 
strengthening of the other country's fortifications — at a 
percentage. It was high treason to help the enemy in war- 
time, but you could sell him your deadliest inventions if 
your government offered less or waved you aside. And you 
could manufacture those weapons and export them to the 
enemy by the million so long as he had not given you notice 
that he was going to fight you next week. Quite often a 
nation was hoist with its own petard. 2 And no sooner had 
you devastated your enemy's country than you lent him 
money to build it all up again. In vain shells hissed and 
dynamite exploded. The stockbroker followed ever on the 

1 According to Lloyd's Register, there were at the end of September, 1912, 
twelve foreign warships, amounting to 117,650 tons, under construction in 
British yards. 

2 Literally true for Russia, which was, according to General Polivanoff, 
the War Minister, dependent upon Germany for shells and other munitions. 
At the outbreak of the war we, too, were dependent on enemy countries for 
electrical apparatus, field glasses, etc., while, according to Sir Edward 
Carson, we had to look to Austria for spare gun parts and accessories, not a 
single one of which had been made in England. 



PATRIOTISM AND PERCENTAGE 263 

heels of the soldier and the grass of new life (and new loans) 
sprang up over the blackened ruins. Indeed, nations in- 
stead of being extinguished in the struggle for political 
existence, because they were too weak to pay their debts, 
had to be kept artificially alive in order to pay them. 

And not only was it permissible to arm your enemy of 
to-morrow; it was considered exemplary to teach him the 
whole art of war, to train the young idea how to shoot, to 
familiarize him with the latest instruments and the most 
scientific manoeuvres. It was thus that the unthinking 
West equipped Japan with the thunderbolts destined to 
recoil upon Europe's own head. 

The sage here refers the reader to the fiscal chapter from 
which I have already quoted, and remarks that even the 
Lord Chamberlain of England, the notorious Lord Pro- 
tector, in his plea for the splendid isolation of his country, 
did not extend his political insight to the underlying in- 
ternational threads which, by linking stock exchange with 
stock exchange, were making isolation impossible. So long 
as Britons insisted on using their savings, not for the de- 
velopment of home industries, but for furthering every sort 
of foreign enterprise, taxation on foreign products did but 
little to redress the balance in favor of their own country. 
With one hand they were crippling the foreigner, but with 
the other they were propping him up. With the right hand 
they waved the Union Jack, with the left they pocketed 
the foreign dividends. Had the Lord Chamberlain been 
logical he would have appealed to his countrymen not only 
to pay more for their food and manufactures in the larger 
interests of Empire, but to draw less from their investments. 
He seems to have gone so far as to say that who sups with the 
Tzar must have a long spoon, but this apprehension of 
Russia's designs was not accompanied by a warning to his 
countrymen to desist from collaborating in them. A con- 



264 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

sistent Chamberlain would have said: "Let no Anglo- 
Saxon collaborate in the Trans-Siberian railway, whether 
as shareholder or engineer, and whosoever buys Russian 
bonds is a traitor to Britain. Take only South African 
shares, howsoever swindling. In view, too, of the dangerous 
potentialities of the Monroe Doctrine, let every good 
patriot sell out his American stock, nor help to capitalize 
and foster the Power which may one day turn and rend us." 
But these considerations, observes Li Hang Li, obvious 
as they appear to us to-day, were hidden from even the 
most sagacious of mediaeval mandarins, and it was they 
and their purblind percentage-hunting people who awak- 
ened in China the sleeping Dragon that was to swallow 
them all. 



THE WAR AND THE CHURCHES 

" L'Europe fut un champ de massacre et d'horreur: 
Et l'orthodoxie meme, aveugle en sa fureur, 
De tes dogmes trompeurs nourissant son idee, 
Oublia la douceur aux Chretiens commandee, 
Et crut, pour venger Dieu de ses fiers ennemis, 
Tout ce que Dieu defend legitime et permis." — Boileau. 



If a man could be drained of his blood, and yet go about 
with every vital function absolutely unimpaired, if a 
motor-car could be eviscerated of its valves and cylinders 
and yet whiz along exactly as before, if an eagle could 
have its pinions amputated and yet sail aloft into the em- 
pyraean as superbly as ever, we should come to the conclu- 
sion that the blood, the machinery, the wings, played no 
real part in the life of the man, the car, the bird, but were 
mere ornamental appendages. And since, were Chris- 
tianity now abolished and exiled by the Defence of the 
Realm Act, there would be no difference whatever visible 
in the functioning of the State and the prosecution of the 
war, 1 can we escape a similar conclusion about the Church? 

Some of its best sons do not think so. "War being a 
survival of barbarism," writes the Bishop of Hereford, 
"is essentially opposed to the spirit of Christ." {Times, 
January 24, 1916.) "At the outbreak of the war," says the 

1 An anonymous printed postcard asking me to help stop the war "for the 
sake of Jesus Christ" is the only reminder I have personally had that I am 
living in a New Testament country — a fact which just before the war was 
daily impressed on my consciousness by the Kikuyu controversy. 

265 



266 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

Dean of Durham, "men awoke to the discovery that Chris- 
tendom was really swayed by motives which had no pre- 
tence of being Christian, and that the Churches had be- 
come parasitic, bestowing their facile consecrations on 
every national ambition and failing to rebuke any national 
crime." (The Faith and the War, Macmillan.) "The 
message of Christ to the nations," says the Dean of St. 
Paul's in the same volume, "has never been accepted in 
practice and seldom even understood. . . . The record 
of organized Christianity in promoting peace and goodwill 
among the nations is not an inspiriting one." Even quite 
commonplace Christians appear to have reached the same 
conclusion, for according to the Bishop of London, preach- 
ing at Chiswick (January 23, 191 6): "From end to end of 
England we find people who at the bottom of their hearts 
have grown to believe— although they are afraid to admit 
it — that the war was the absolute breakdown of Chris- 
tianity." 

Now with the whole of Europe honeycombed by institu- 
tions for the gospel of non-resistance, this is a serious, 
awkward and portentous situation, auguring possibly a 
transformation in the religious ideas of Christendom. 
Well may the Dean of Durham anticipate that "of all the 
national institutions, the Churches will, perhaps, be the 
most severely criticised, and the most sternly handled." 
Already Mr. Galsworthy has announced that the old 
mystical Christianity is dead. Let me say at once that I 
agree rather with the Dean of St. Paul's. "It is nonsense 
to talk of the failure of Christianity when Christianity has 
never been tried." 1 

1 The Pope's pathetically ineffective protest against "the suicide of 
Europe" is the reductio ad absurdum of his position and of Roman Cathol- 
icism. The attempt of Cardinal Bourne to ascribe the war to the rise of 
Protestantism and Rationalism is grotesque. (Pastoral Letter sent, 1916.) 
As if before the sixteenth century lay the Golden Age! Dr. William Barry 



THE WAR AND THE CHURCHES 267 

II 

Not content with the passive contradiction between 
Rule, Britannia and the Sermon on the Mount, the 
Church has not infrequently become a political platform 
for speeding up the war. Thus, even in the Intercessory 
Services of the New Year, the Bishop of Carlisle dealt with 
the lack of patriotism of the industrial and other classes, 
the Dean of Durham emphasized the need of civilian sacri- 
fice, the new Master of the Temple attributed our failure 
to our contempt for education, Dr. F. B. Meyer, for the 
Free Churches, suggested a Commission to enquire into 
the sources of moral and religious decay, and Canon E. H. 
Pearce, speaking at Westminster Abbey, deprecated criti- 
cism of the Ministry or the Grand Fleet. And if a rare 
cleric — like the Headmaster of Eton — tries timidly to sug- 
gest that clinging to Gibraltar is not precisely identical 
with clinging to the Rock of Ages, the howl that goes up 
is a prompt reminder that the Church exists only on suf- 
ferance. No wonder it has abounded in these " facile con- 
secrations" of which the Dean of Durham speaks. No 
wonder the Church has always made religion a branch of 
politics, instead of making politics a branch of religion. 

And with the pulpit thus turned into a platform, the 
transition to a recruiting station was simple. Every church 
had become one, Mr. Snowden complained in the House of 
Commons, and indeed special appeals for recruits were read 
both in the Free and the Established Churches. Nor has the 
patriotism of the clergy been merely vicarious. As was once 
said ot Archbishop Trench, the heart of the soldier beat un- 

also regards the war as "a lesson for agnostics," and a writer (M) in the 
Manchester Guardian blames with equal absurdity the intellectual levity of 
our generation. In truth war-lust, like sex-lust, precedes faith or philosophy. 
Apparently in France the war is strengthening Catholicism; in reality it is 
only strengthening the paganism of national religion. 



268 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

der the cassock of the priest, and not content with risking 
their lives as chaplains, many ministers have gone to the 
trenches as fighters. Though even Parliament felt it scanda- 
lous to conscript clergymen, they themselves were restive 
under episcopal veto and many petitioned for its removal. 
Their sons, at any rate, have hastened to the front and have 
died — the Bishop of Sheffield tells us — in a higher ratio than 
the sons of any other class, thirteen sons of Bishops alone 
perishing up to the end of last year. No wonder, if, as 
Coleridge wrote "in April, 1798, during the alarm of an 
invasion:" 

"The sweet words 
Of Christian promise, words that even yet 
Might stem destruction were they wisely preached, 
Are muttered o'er by men, whose tones proclaim 
How flat and wearisome they feel their trade." 

In Germany we even hear of rosaries whose beads are toy 
shells and cartridges, while the military authorities are 
considering the possibility of using church bells for making 
shells. 

And apart from everywhere blessing the war, the Church 
has nowhere intervened to modify its abominations or 
misalliances except, of course, when committed by the 
enemy. No German pulpit has castigated the sinking of 
the Lusitania, and in England the debate on "air reprisals" 
has been left almost exclusively to laymen. A few odd 
and obscure clergymen, like the Rev. F. C. Davies of 
Enfield, have preached Pacifist doctrine, but the only 
Christian sect that has given a sign of life is that which 
dispenses with clergymen. But even the young Quakers 
have gone out to the front as ambulance-men or com- 
promised as mine-sweepers; indeed, many appear to have 
become actual fighters. No wonder the Daily Express 



THE WAR AND THE CHURCHES 269 

denounces in flaring humorless headlines "A Peace Crank 
Church." » 

Ill 

While the bulk of the Church seems blind to this glaring 
discrepancy between precept and practice, or at least to be 
using that third eyelid which as Oliver Wendell Holmes 
pointed out, excludes not all light but just as much as it 
is wished to exclude — one is comforted to find from the 
volume already quoted that the Church possesses a mi- 
nority which is not afraid to look facts in the face. This 
collection of independent essays by members of the Council 
of the Church Union, is one of the most significant symp- 
toms of Christian vitality that I have come across for years. 
It confronts with courage and heterodoxy the fearful 
problems raised by the war. In Catholicism the Modernist 
wing has been crushed : whether it will carry Protestantism 
remains to be seen. 

The bulk of the volume does not indeed concern the 
central Christian problem of non-resistance: it is occupied 
or pre-occupied with problems, which belong equally to 
Judaism or religion generally, which indeed have no special 
reason for being debated now except that the levity of 
mankind neglects them until they are forced in gigantic 
contours upon its consciousness. Thus, the problems of 
evil, of providence, of immortality, belong to the homespun 
of daily life. Even the problem of war faces one every time 
one opens a history book. If God and War cannot be 
reconciled, then it was not necessary to wait till August, 
1914, to become an atheist. Voltaire did not become one, 
though more of the horrors of war are collected in a chapter 
of Candide than appeared even credible before to-day. 

1 In "Holy Russia" twenty-seven followers of Tolstoy, including a Jew, 
have been court-martialled for issuing a pamphlet with the new-fangled 
doctrine "Thou shalt not kill." They were, however, acquitted. 



270 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

And the reconciliation of Christianity with War is equally 
a problem of the past. But for the man in the street these 
problems are practically novel, and particularly is he 
struck by the flagrant contradiction between the teaching 
of Christ and the Great War in which so many Christian 
nations are fighting one another, while Germany lacks 
even the minor alleviation of fighting the Turk — nay, is 
found fighting like a fiend, while the Paynim fights like a 
gentleman. 

IV 

Neglecting, therefore, all the other theological problems 
of the war, which are common to all religions, and limiting 
ourselves to the single point of its inconsistency with the 
Gospel doctrine of non-resistance, we find the more con- 
scious part of the Church provided with only too many 
solutions. The Founder spoke with Oriental hyperbole. 
Or He did not really forbid fighting. Or if He did, not fight- 
ing in self-defence, still less for the defence of others, nor 
can we suddenly apply an ideal for which the past has not 
prepared. Or even if war is unchristian its results may be 
Christian, both directly by suppressing wickedness and 
indirectly by improving the soldiers and the nation. 

The proofs that the Master did not really forbid fighting 
are equally varied. The doctrine of turning the other 
cheek referred only to private frictions. Living in a small 
State under the pax romana, He "neither directly contem- 
plated nor provided for" a Christianity divided by inde- 
pendent nationalities. (Cyril William Emmet, Ethics of the 
New Testament.) Or if He did foresee it, he would not 
spare His followers the responsibility of applying His 
spirit to modern politics. (Ibid.) Or he expected the end 
of the world soon, so that non-resistance was merely what 
the German theologians call an " Inter imsethik" a code 



THE WAR AND THE CHURCHES 27 1 

for the interval. (Ibid.) Or Englishmen and the English 
nation are two distinct things and it is therefore sophistic 
of Dr. Lyttelton to argue that because England is a Chris- 
tian nation therefore English men are debarred from fight- 
ing. (A delightfully Hibernian refutation of sophistry upon 
which Mr. Glazebrook, Chairman of the Churchmen's 
Union, is to be congratulated.) 

As for the legitimacy of self-defence, it is difficult to 
disagree with the divine who writes: "If anyone is attacked 
on four sides and defends his life, he acts in self-defence 
and fulfils a Christian duty." Unfortunately the argument 
comes from Dr. Dryander, the German Court Chaplain, 
who adds: "We are in this position." 1 That the indirect 
effects of war may be Christian is a favorite apologia. 
Think of the Christianity that lies in offering yourself as a 
target in the trenches. "Greater love hath no man than 
this that a man lay down his life for his friends." Think, 
too, how the spiritual life is quickened in a man constantly 
on the brink of ( death. Think, too, of the uplifting of the 
civilian population. The Rev. Dimsdale Young (Ex- 
President of the Wesleyan Conference) boldly expressed his 
belief that Christianity had gained greatly by the war. In 
particular immortality was now the leading light of man. 
More boldly still the war in its direct effects has been made 
synonymous with Christianity. A war against militarism 
— nay, to kill war itself — is precisely what the Prince of 
Peace wishes. It is a holy war. It is the via dolorosa to 
the Millennium. "We and our Allies believe," said the 
Bishop of Norwich, "that we are fighting to maintain the 
cause of Christ." 2 Less diffidently, "It is God's war," 

1 Eucken's view is that the world is not yet ready for the pure milk of 
human kindness and that Luther had to countenance war. 

2 "We are waging a war for Christianity itself," said the German Pastor 
Dorrfuss. See "The War for the Words." 



272 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

cried the Bishop of London, in his New Year's diocesan 
letter. And while the principal of a Baptist College in 
the North of England maintained that relentless war was 
our present supreme duty, Archdeacon Wilberforce, Chap- 
lain of the House of Commons, did not hesitate to say, 
"the killing of the Germans is a Divine service in the fullest 
sense of the term"— a view of course absolutely paralleled in 
the book circulated among soldiers by the German chaplain 
Schettler which teaches that "to bayonet the enemy and 
smash in his skull is God's service" (Quoted in the Lower 
House of the Prussian Diet by the Socialist, Herr Hoffmann.) 
" Love itself may demand repression of crime among indi- 
viduals or nations," urges Principal Garvie. 

The war being thus pre-eminently Christian, the Church 
is as qualified to denounce "a premature peace" as any of 
the rumbustious patriots who break up the Elian quiet of 
Quaker Meetings by howling down St. Paul. "Anything 
in such a war is better than a premature peace," declared 
the Bishop of London. 1 And the Archbishop of Canter- 
bury actually refused to sign a proposed appeal of Christian 
Churches for an early peace. The Church has not yet gone 
so far as to endorse the rumbustious version of the Beati- 
tude, Cursed be the Peacemakers, for they shall be called 
pro-Germans. But it has not shrunk from suggesting — 
through the Bishop of Chelmsford 2 — that now that colored 
blood and Christian blood have flowed together in the 

1 In checking the ardor of his junior clergy to do war work or even to 
fight, the Bishop remarked naively that if the clergy gave the impression 
they regarded physical force as alone effective "it would either shock the 
consciences or lower the ideals of the laity." 

2 This Bishop has, however, some bold sayings to his credit, reminding 
the world of the old sins of Russia and Belgium and urging, "We must 
cleanse England before God will come down off the fence on our side." A 
conscientious objector in his diocese, however (at Bradford), was regarded 
by the chairman of the appeal board as "blasphemous" for saying that "the 
war is God's judgment on sinning nations." 



THE WAR AND THE CHURCHES 273 

same cause, England owes it to these benighted heathen to 
bring them to baptism. I trust that at least the Society 
for the Conversion of the Jews will have the grace or the 
humor to cease from troubling just now. That is a War 
Economy I can cordially recommend to the Society and 
its supporters. 1 

V 

Nothing marks the movement of modern thought more 
significantly than that the Church has now practically 
lost its ancient repugnance to blood, just as it abandoned 
its ancient objection to interest. In France there are 20,000 
soldier priests. In England the Bishop of Bangor seems to 
have been alone in recalling clearly to the priest panting for 
the fray that "shedding blood is and has been everywhere 
at all times considered contrary to the Law of the Church 
and an offence to the conscience of Christian men." 2 Even 
the Bishop of Hereford was content to point to the remedial 
rear of an army as the more appropriate place for a minister 
of the Gospel. Though the Archbishop of Canterbury 
admitted in the House of Lords that "the technical law 
of the Church forbade the shedding of blood by those 
in holy orders," he preferred to rest the case for non- 
conscription of clerics on other grounds, and he said the 
ordination candidates of the Church of England have 
"come forward" splendidly. 3 And the tradition thus 

1 A German Theologian (Joseph Schmidlin) laments that the war has 
divided British and German missionaries in their African work and that 
German missionaries are in concentration camps in India. 

2 Of thirty-two theological colleges and hostels in the Church of England 
nine are closed — there are some 340 students as against 1258 normally. 
Roman Catholic and Jewish priests and students are exempt, though the 
Chief Rabbi has annulled the Mosaic Law prohibiting "Cohanim" (the 
priestly tribe) from being near the dead. 

3 " None fight better for the King than we do," said Origen, apparently con- 
sidering "Orare est pugnare." Christ wants more of this sort of fighting, 



274 THE WAR F0R THE WORLD 

abandoned is older than the texts for non-resistance. David 
was not allowed to build God's Temple because he had 
been a warrior; Solomon was forbidden to use iron tools 
in its structure because they were associated with blood- 
shed, and it was in pursuance of this tradition and not on 
account of the Sermon on the Mount that the mediaeval 
Church instituted a service of expiation for soldiers, and 
with a grim humorlessness burnt its heretics to avoid 
shedding their blood, while forbidding its priests to practice 
harmless necessary surgery. If the surrender of such 
quibbles and tortuosities leaves the Church to face the 
naked facts of life, it is a manlier Church that accepts war 
as a high tragedy, which, no less than a stage tragedy, may 
be a purgation by pity and terror. But a manlier Church 
is not necessarily a more Christian Church. When the 
child of a friend of mine, hearing that some soldiers had 
shot and killed a soldier of another nation, enquired in 
incredulous horror, "But didn't they know he was there? " 
those infant lips reduced to nought all the eloquence of 
the Bishops. Verily, "except ye be converted and become 
as little children, ye shall not enter into the Kingdom of 
Heaven." 1 

VI 

If, as one born unburdened by the apostolic paradoxes 
that embarrass the Bishops, I might venture to give them 
ghostly counsel, I would begin by remarking that if the 
Church now finds itself in an incongruous position it has 
only itself to blame for neglecting the path of silence and 

according to Father Vaughan who says our business is to keep on killing 
Germans and regarded the success of a Conference on "The Call of the War 
to Prayer" as "a pat on the back from our blessed Lord." Sunday labor in 
making munitions has been nowhere denounced. 

1 Somewhat belatedly, but in noble language, the Bishop of Lincoln pro- 
tested against the unconscientious treatment of the conscientious objector. 



THE WAR AND THE CHURCHES 275 

peace pointed out by the Master. "Render unto Caesar the 
things that are Caesar's" is surely a sign-post showing the 
way out for the Church, when it confronts what it can neither 
countenance nor cure. The Church is not a political plat- 
form. One does not go to an Abbey or a Cathedral to hear 
speeches or newspaper articles. The Church should have 
remained a centre of beauty and prayer and hallowed quiet, 
of great literature and noble music, a balm to the wounded 
spirit, an anodyne, a counteractive, a reminder of realities 
no less substantial than the war; of the good that may yet 
— despite the howlers-down of St. Paul — overcome evil. 
The Church should have communed with its own heart and 
been still. "Things without remedy," said Lady Macbeth, 
"should be without regard." 1 To those who brought it the 
problem of their conscience — should they fight? — the answer 
was the same. "Render unto Caesar the things that are 
Caesar's." Every citizen must fight — unless not to fight is 
even more dangerous. Martyrdom was ever the Christian's 
privilege and zeal. 

With the results of the fight the Church as such is not 
concerned. Jesus did not win. Providence is on the side 
of the biggest battalions, for it would be an unjust Provi- 
dence that refused to give even the devil his due. On the 
plane of physical force, the greatest and most efficient force 
will always win. On the plane of spirit physical force is not 
so much impotent as irrelevant. "Thou hast conquered, 
O Galilaean" was not a surrender to physical force. And 

1 It is with characteristic Teutonic thoroughness that the Chrislliche Welt, 
the leading religious organ of Germany, demanded "A Moratorium for 
Christianity." To preach Christianity, said the writer, in these days of 
torpedo and poison-gas was only to provoke "mocking hellish laughter." 
Curiously enough the Free Church Conference imagined that all that the 
soldiers would be finding out was the unreality of the divisions of Christen- 
dom, because of all the chaplains and padres having comforted one an- 
other's flocks in the hour of death. 



276 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

this brings me to the crux and conclusion of the whole 
matter. 

The difficulties of the Christian Church are not confined 
to war-time. They are perpetual and inherent. They 
arise from its being the Church of a majority and from try- 
ing in war-time to be everywhere a national Church. But 
Christianity is a spirit, not an institution, and that spirit the 
spirit of a minority. That the Sermon on the Mount is 
impossible as the basis of a State has been candidly admitted 
by high ecclesiastical authority. But it was never meant 
to be nationalised. 1 It was meant to be the inspiration 
of a few — the salt of the earth, the yeast to leaven the lump. 
Its hyperbolism, its spiritual extremism, is necessary to 
offset the grossness of the body politic. It is not "Interval 
Ethics," it is "Minority Ethics." For although it appeals 
to all mankind, it is aware that only the elect will vibrate 
to its teaching. 

Christianity cannot "pay." It is a religion for losers. 
The voice crying in the wilderness can never receive the fee 
of a K. C. or a Cabinet Minister. The attempt to fit this 
tragic universe of ours into a comfortable Church establish- 
ment is hopeless. The function of the Christian is to strug- 
gle and suffer. And hence in every great crisis the real 
Christians will be found not in the Church but outside it. 
They are the eternal protestants of humanity and must 
in every age be crucified for its salvation. 

1 The Bishop of Carlisle confessed that the Church is more Jewish and 
Pagan than Christian, but he does not seem to see that a National Faith 
cannot be otherwise. 



WRITTEN BY A JEW THIS CHRISTMAS EVE 

"The trenches have been cautioned this year against a Christmas 
truce." — Daily Paper. 

" When we beheld thy kingdom come on earth, 
All eyes upstrained to thee, all knees low-bent, 
Man swathed in thee as in an element, 
Art, Music, Letters circling round thy birth, 
Bejewelled Temples blazoning thy worth, 
Jehovah banished to our nomad tent — 
Then, brother, thee enthroned, with bitter mirth, 
We left and on our thorny way we went. 

" But now that once again we see thee bleed, 
Deserted, where thy worshippers have banned thee, 
Thy agony is ours, thy homeless need — 
After such startling glories so to brand thee! 
Dear fainting Jesu, now to thine own seed, 
Creep home again — who else can understand thee? " 



277 



MR. MOREL AND THE CONGO 

(Speech at the City Temple, 20th October, 19 10) 

"The strongest man on earth is he who stands most alone." — 
Ibsen: An Enemy of the People. 

I esteem it a great privilege to be associated with this 
tribute to the magnificent work of Mr. Morel. For unlike 
my friend, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, I have no peculiar 
claim to speak on the crime of the Congo. Sir Arthur has 
devoted himself to the cause of the oppressed native with 
the quixotism which the sight of injustice always awakens 
in him: he has written a book, he has toured the country 
in company with Mr. Morel to arouse public opinion. I, 
on the other hand, am only one of the public whose opinion 
has been aroused and I appear here at the penitent form — ■ 
if the expression may be permitted in this temple of the 
new theology — to express my shame at having so long pas- 
sively connived at atrocities for which every British citizen 
is responsible under the Berlin treaty. We cannot leave 
these things, it would seem, to our professional politicians. 
They suffer from that dread Congolese disease, sleeping 
sickness. Private men must rush forward to uplift the flag 
of England's honor which their nerveless fingers have 
dropped in the dust. While noble lords and knights pro- 
fess to lead us along the paths of chivalry, it was left to a 
Liverpool shipping clerk to be the banner-bearer of Britain. 

There is a girl in one of Mr. Henry James's novels, a 
sweet innocent American girl, who being brought in con- 
tact with a complex European lady wonders whether "the 

278 



MR. MOREL AND THE CONGO 279 

great historic word ' wicked ' ' ' could be applied to her. Most 
of us, too — though we know how weak and foolish our friends 
can be — are fortunate enough to make our acquaintance 
with "wicked" people only in newspapers, novels and melo- 
dramas. We too are apt to think that wickedness has been 
largely banished from civilization — it is an ignorance we 
acquire at school where we are taught that barbarians 
roamed where now are only civilized Christians. And so 
we cry like that cheery character in The Cloister and the 
Hearth: "Courage, the devil is dead." 

Liberal Christianity, I presume, does not believe in the 
devil— in the personal devil, that is. But in the impersonal 
devil, who can help believing? For if we see no concrete 
evil spirit, we do see everywhere a spirit of evil that may still 
justify us in speaking of the devil. In the old monastic 
legends the devil was represented as always taking different 
shapes the better to do his evil work. But I do not think 
the devil ever disguised himself more effectually than when 
he made people believe he was dead and gone, and that 
Christianity reigned in Christendom without a rival. It 
is through this clever dodge of his — this policy of lying low 
and "sayin' nuffin" — that he has been able to execute in 
the Congo a work of evil of unparalleled magnitude, to 
drench with blood and tears a country half as large as 
Europe. For who could believe that in our own century 
a Christian King could have sold his soul to him for gold? 
Who could believe that the genial long-bearded Leopold 
was a monstrous Moloch to whom thousands of little 
African children were sacrificed, a Juggernaut, with a 
rubber-tyred car, whose wheels revolved remorselessly in 
the gore of the myriads it crushed? These things do not 
happen nowadays, we thought, they belong to the days of 
Nero or Herod. And even when — largely through the 
labors of Mr. Morel — it was brought home to us that this 



280 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

Christian King out-heroded Herod, we felt that his death 
would mean the wind-up of this Satanic era. The Congo 
would pass over to Belgium and a Christian Parliament 
would hasten to atone for the past and to send its rays of 
love and light over darkest Africa. How the devil chuckled 
in his sleeve amid all his sorrow at the death of his royal 
henchman! For he knew that Parliaments and peoples 
are as temptable by gold as Kings and individuals, that 
Belgium, whose financiers, statesmen and soldiers, had 
already been tainted by complicity, would not lightly aban- 
don its unholy gains, still less spend a million a year for 
twenty years to bring about that moral regeneration of the 
natives which it professed was its dearest object. But 
nevertheless a Parliament cannot act as brazenly as an 
autocratic monarch, and is moreover always sure to con- 
tain some champions of righteousness, if only by way of 
opposition. And so the devil has been so far defeated that 
he has been expelled from portions of the Congo and given 
notice of ejection from others, and though an area has still 
been indefinitely reserved as the devil's play-ground, we 
are entitled to congratulate ourselves — and still more Mr. 
Morel and the Congo Reform Association — on a gigantic 
amelioration. Rubber is no longer collected by the lash 
and the knife and the gun, little children no longer hold up 
their bleeding stumps in mute protest against Europe. 
The only bleeding now known to us is that of the rubber 
trees, killed and drained of their precious sap in hot haste 
by the companies which have to clear out, and which in 
their ruthless greed would leave nothing behind them but a 
desert. 

Wickedness, you see, is no " great historic word," if his- 
toric means antiquated. Wickedness is modern, up-to- 
date. Wickedness is as fresh as this morning's paper — nay, 
it often is this morning's paper, crammed with lies and 



MR. MOREL AND THE CONGO 28 1 

sensation. For another of the devil's cunning contrivances 
is to make people believe that what they read is true. 
The first book printed was the Bible, consequently people 
have ever since associated print with truth. That was a 
very ingenious revenge of the devil on the Bible. One of 
the most frequent shapes the devil takes nowadays is that 
of newspaper proprietor. He runs papers in all countries 
— he and his little printer's devils — and it is these papers 
of his which have so long contributed to keep back the 
truth of this Congo business. The devil is particularly 
clever in clouding over ugly truths with a mist of fine 
words, and one of his most complicated tricks is to accuse 
his enemies of being his friends. Men like Mr. Morel, 
whose whole life has shown an exalted sacrifice of personal 
interests, find themselves bespattered with doubts and sus- 
picions. " What is he making out of it? " the devil whispers. 
I know no finer weapon in the devil's armory than this 
insinuation. For most people are unable to understand 
that a man will act not only not for his own personal 
interests but actually against them. And this same weapon 
has been turned against Mr. Morel's country. What is 
England going to make out of it? Has she not her eye on 
grabbing land and selling gin? Against these guiles and 
wiles of the devil there is only one defence — the good old 
defence of "tell the truth and shame the devil." Mr. 
Morel told the truth— and fortunately for him the evidence 
was too glaring. The crime of the Congo needed no Sher- 
lock Holmes. Charred villages and rivers of blood and 
heaps of severed hands — these need no ingenious puttings 
of two and two together to make five. A clodhopper could 
trace how Leopold stole his treasure out of these poor dead 
hands, how these bleeding stumps upheld the pomp of 
his royal state, and the magnificent establishments of the 
company-promoters, the three hundred per cent conces- 



282 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

sionaires. We have heard of the skeleton at the feast, but 
what of the skeleton under the feast, the skeleton upon 
whose bones rest so many banqueting tables! If I had a 
cinematograph I should like to show you a picture of barons, 
counts, and Grand Marshals of Belgium banqueting amid 
all the outer refinements of civilization — with spotless 
napery and silver plate and white-gloved footmen — and 
below, in an African forest, the cannibal chiefs they employed 
to extort their profits, feeding on the bodies of their victims. 
And there were missionaries from Belgium itself scattered 
amid these forests — missionaries who saw and knew. They 
were there to spread Christianity. But the wonder to me 
is that when they saw they did not hurry back to Belgium 
— where their teaching was so much more needed. But 
they remained, and with them missionaries from other 
sects and countries, who appear in some instances to have 
played a noble part in publishing the truth or protecting 
the natives. But the irony remains that their mission in 
the Congo was less to spread Christianity than to protect 
the natives against the ravages of Christendom. 

And this irony was even vaster than the mere missionary 
comedy — for it embraced all Belgium, which was only 
in the Congo in a mission of civilization, nay, all Europe 
and America which had guaranteed this moral and indus- 
trial regeneration. The devil, we have seen, plays many a 
part, but his climax of audacity, his crowning theatrical 
creation, is the role of philanthropist. The old rhyme says 
that "when the devil was sick, the devil a saint would be." 
Not so. It is when the devil is most strong and active, 
that he would be a saint. The very name of Congo Free 
State is a masterpiece of pious masquerading. The Inter- 
national Association, which created the Congo Free State, 
actually declared that it was founded "to promote the 
civilization and commerce of Africa and for other humane 



MR. MOREL AND THE CONGO 283 

and benevolent motives." With the blessings of the British 
churches and the prayers of Bismarck, the Congo was 
launched to "take up the white man's burden." I hope 
that Mr. Kipling has by this time discovered that when 
he wrote that noble Christian poem he was acting as Poet 
Laureate to the devil. The "fluttered folk and wild" 
whose burden the white man must take up, Mr. Kipling 
describes as 

"Half-devil and half-child." 

It is true. The native of the Congo is no angel. But what 
is to be thought of the white man who has not even the 
excuse of childishness for his devilry? The white man who 
has demoralized even the savage, who has taught cruelty 
even to the barbarian? The white man who created a 
condition to which even slavery is enviable? For slaves 
are at least fed and guarded like horses, not starved and 
mutilated. Australia began as a convict-prison and rose 
to a colony. The Congo began as a colony and sank to a 
convict-prison. And this was how the white Belgian took 
up his burden. They say the devil is not so black as he 
is painted. I can quite believe it. I can even believe his 
predominant hue is white. 

There is indeed a " white man's burden," but it is to battle 
against evil, in whatever spot and under whatever com- 
plexion. For white men are rare. There are not many 
Conan Doyles. Still rarer are the Morels who devote their 
entire lives to the destruction of some piece of the devil's 
work. And let us remember that, unlike Conan Doyle, 
Morel had no name to conjure with when he began his 
career of quixotry. To-day when Lord Cromer and the 
Archbishop of Canterbury vie with each other in the praises 
of Morel, it is easy to forget the long obscure struggle of 
an unknown youth uncheered and unsupported save by 



284 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

his conscience. He was only twenty-four when he couched 
his lance and charged — a shipping-clerk against a king 
and all his minions of darkness. Can we have a better 
proof that one man with God is a majority? For this clerk 
has moved Parliaments and Foreign Offices and Churches 
in more than one country, ay, in more than one conti- 
nent. He has even achieved the miracle of bringing the 
Established and Dissenting Churches together — -upon this 
question at least. 

There are books laying down the rules for clerks — books 
of the school of Samuel Smiles — that tell how clerks may 
rise to success. Respect for seniors, deference to employers, 
strict attention to business — and the like. Model yourself 
on your masters and you will rise to mastership. Young 
Morel did not follow this road to success. On the contrary 
he attended to things that were not his business, he got 
wind of the corpses rotting in the Congo, of what lay behind 
this profitable Liverpool business of shipping rubber from 
the Congo to Antwerp, he even remonstrated with his 
employers. And his success puts Samuel Smiles to shame. 
True, it is not a pecuniary success. There Samuel Smiles 
was right. But Mr. Morel has cleared an area larger than 
France and Germany from super-slavery; he has restored 
some of the rights both native and international that were 
guaranteed by the Berlin Congress. This is a success 
which puts him on a par with a great soldier or a great 
politician. But a great soldier when he comes home is 
feted by the nation, ennobled by the sovereign, and pre- 
sented by Parliament with a purse of gold. And a great 
politician receives place and power and salary. Mr. Morel 
has received neither gold nor a title. But if he has not 
made money he has made history. And if he has not 
achieved a Knighthood, he has achieved something finer 
and rarer — he has been a knight — a knight without fear 



MR. MOREL AND THE CONGO 285 

or reproach. If we are to define Mr. Morel as a politician, 
we shall call him, as Sir Harry Johnston has so justly called 
him, "a great Imperialist." Just as politician has been 
degraded to mean a party politician, instead of a man who 
serves the public good, so Imperialist has been degraded 
to mean a man who extends the area of the Empire. I 
should like it to mean a man who extends the honor of the 
Empire. For many years Mr. Morel with the Congo Re- 
form Association stood alone in demanding that England's 
treaty-rights should not be trampled upon by King Leopold 
or the Belgians! Can you believe it? Britannia, who we 
are given to understand, rules the waves, left it to a mere 
private citizen to vindicate her rights and her honor? Even 
now Britannia only opposes a passive resistance to Belgian 
arrogance. She refuses to recognize the annexation of 
the Congo till Mr. Morel's reforms are carried out, but 
she should have refused to permit the annexation without 
obtaining guarantees for these reforms. And even her 
minimum of resistance to Belgium would, I grieve to say, 
have been withheld, had Belgium not been a minor power. 
I know no epoch in English history when England's sense 
of dignity and self-respect stood so near zero. The more 
Dreadnoughts we build, the more panic-stricken we become. 
Consols are low to-day but not so low as the British Lion's 
tail. If there is the slightest stiffness in that tail, it is due 
not to the Foreign Office, not to the professional politicians, 
not to the noisy so-called Imperialists, not to the House 
of Lords, not to our Howards and our Percys, but to the 
sleepless insistence of an ex-clerk. Gentlemen, Mr. Morel 
has obeyed that great dictum of the Talmud: in a land 
where there is no man, be thou a man. And he is a man of 
bull dog tenacity — he will not let go. No acts of the Bel- 
gian parliament, no soft soap of politicians and financiers, 
no bright bubbles of promises, will make him relax his 



286 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

grip of the question till the entire area of the Congo is 
restored to its native owners, with freedom of trade for 
themselves and the world. And this shall and must come 
to pass. The Congo Slave State shall be truly the Congo 
Free State. And then, just as when Dante paced the 
streets of Ravenna, the people would say: ''There goes 
the man who has been in hell," so we shall say, as we see 
Morel go by, "There goes the man who has defeated the 
devil." 



THE AWKWARD AGE OF THE WOMEN'S 
MOVEMENT 

{Fortnightly Review, November, 1912) 

"And what did she get by it?" said my Uncle Toby. 
"What does any woman get by it?" said my father. 
"Martyrdom,'" replied the young Benedictine. 

— Tristram Shandy. 

The present situation of Women's Suffrage in England 
recalls the old puzzle: What happens when an irresistible 
force meets an immovable body? The irresistible force 
is the religious passion of myriads of women, the fury of 
self-sacrifice, the righteous zeal that shrinks not even from 
crime; the immovable body may be summed up as Mr. 
Asquith. Almost as gross an incarnation of Tory prejudice 
as Squire Western, who laid it down that women should 
come in with the first dish and go out with the first glass, 
Mr. Asquith is all that stands between the sex and the 
suffrage. 

The answer to the old puzzle, I suppose, would be that 
though the immovable body does not move, yet the impact 
of the irresistible force generates heat, which, as we know 
from Tyndall, is a mode of motion. At any rate, heat is 
the only mode in which the progress of Women's Suffrage 
can be registered to-day. The movement has come to what 
Mr. Henry James might call "the awkward age": an age 
which has passed beyond argument without arriving at 
achievement; an age for which words are too small and 
blows too big. And because impatience has been the salva- 

287 



288 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

tion of the movement, and because the suffragette will not 
believe that the fiery charger which has carried her so far 
cannot really climb the last ridge of the mountain, but 
must be replaced by a mule — that miserable compromise 
between a steed and an anti-suffragist— the awkward age 
is also the dangerous age. 

When the Cabinet of Clement's Inn, perceiving that if a 
Women's Suffrage Bill did not pass this session, the last 
chance — under the Parliament Act — was gone for this 
Parliament, resolved to rouse public opinion by breaking 
tradesmen's windows, it overlooked that the English are a 
nation of shopkeepers, and that the public opinion thus 
roused would be for the first time almost unreservedly 
on the side of the Government. And when the Cabinet 
of Downing Street, moved to responsive recklessness, 
raided the quarters of the Women's Social and Political 
Union and indicted the leaders for criminal conspiracy, 
it equally overlooked an essential factor of the situation. 
The Cabinet of the conspiracy was at least as much a re- 
straint to suffragettes as an incentive. It held in order 
the more violent members, the souls naturally daring or 
maddened by forcible feeding. By its imposition of minor 
forms of lawlessness, it checked the suggestion of major 
forms. Crime was controlled by a curriculum and temper 
steadied by a time-table. The interruptions at meetings 
were distributed among the supposed neuropaths like 
parts at a play, and woe to the maenad who missed her 
cue. With the police, too, the suffragettes lived for the 
most part on terms of cordial co-operation, each side recog- 
nizing that the other must do its duty. When the suf- 
fragettes planned a raid upon Downing Street or the House 
of Commons, they gave notice of time and place, and were 
provided with a sufficient force of police to prevent it. 
Were the day inconvenient for the police, owing to the 



AWKWARD AGE OF THE WOMEN'S MOVEMENT 289 

pressure of social engagements, another day was fixed, 
politics permitting. The entente cordiale extended even 
in some instances to the jailors and the bench, and, as in 
those early days of the Quaker persecution of which Milton's 
friend, Ellwood, has left record, prisoners sometimes left 
their cells for a night to attend to imperative affairs, or 
good-naturedly shortened or cancelled their sentences 
at the pressing solicitation of perturbed magistrates. Prison 
was purified by all these gentle presences, and women 
criminals profited by the removal of the abuses challenged 
by them. Holloway became a home from home, in which 
beaming wardresses welcomed old offenders, and to which 
husbands conducted erring wives in taxi-cabs, much as 
Ellwood and his brethren marched of themselves from 
Newgate to Bridewell, explaining to the astonished citizens 
of London that their word was their keeper. A suffragette's 
word stood higher than consols, and the war-game was 
played cards on table. True, there were brutal interludes 
when Home Secretaries lost their heads, or hysterical 
magistrates their sense of justice, or when the chivalrous 
constabulary of Westminster was replaced by Whitechapel 
police, dense to the courtesies of the situation; but even 
these tragedies were transfused by its humors, by the sub- 
tle duel of woman's wit and man's lumbering legalism. 
The hunger-strike itself, with all its grim horrors and hero- 
isms, was like the plot of a Gilbertian opera. It placed 
the Government on the horns of an Irish bull. Either the 
law must kill or torture prisoners condemned for mild 
offences, or it must permit them to dictate their own terms 
of durance. The criminal code, whose dignity generations of 
male rebels had failed to impair, the whole array of warders, 
lawyers, judges, juries, and policemen, which all the scorn 
of a Tolstoy could not shrivel, shrank into a laughing-stock. 
And the comedy of the situation was complicated and 



290 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

enhanced by the fact that the Home Office, so far from 
being an Inquisition, was more or less tenanted by sym- 
pathizers with Female Suffrage, and that a Home Secretary 
who secretly admired the quixotry of the hunger-strikers 
was forced to feed them forcibly. He must either be de- 
nounced by the suffragettes as a Torquemada or by the 
public as an incapable. Bayard himself could not have 
coped with the position. There was no place like the Home 
Office, and its administrators, like the Governors of the 
Gold Coast, had to be relieved at frequent intervals. As 
for the police, their one aim in life became to avoid arresting 
suffragettes. 

Such was the situation which the Governmental coup 
transformed to tragedy unrelieved, giving us in the place 
of ordered lawlessness and responsible leadership a guerilla 
warfare against society by irresponsible individuals, more 
or less unbalanced. That the heroic incendiary Mrs. Leigh, 
who deserved penal servitude and a statue, had been driven 
wild by forcible feeding was a fact that had given considera- 
ble uneasiness to headquarters, but she had been kept in 
comparative discipline. Now that discipline has been de- 
stroyed, it is possible that other free lances will catch the 
contagion of crime; nay, there are signs that the leaders them- 
selves are being infected through the difficulty of disavow- 
ing their martyrs. The wisest course for the Government 
would be to pardon Mrs. Pankhurst of Paris and officially 
invite her to resume control of her followers before they 
have quite controlled her. 

But even without such a crowning confession of the 
failure of its coup, the humiliation of the Government has 
been sufficiently complete. Forced to put Mrs. Pankhurst 
and the Pethick Lawrences into the luxurious category of 
political prisoners, next to release them altogether, and 
finally to liberate their humblest followers, their hunger- 



AWKWARD AGE OF THE WOMEN S MOVEMENT 2 9 1 

strike on behalf of whose equal treatment set a new standard 
of military chivalry, the Government succeeded only in 
investing the vanished Christabel with a new glamor. 
The Women's Social and Political Union has again baffled 
the Government, and come triumphantly even through 
the window-breaking episode. For if that episode was 
followed by the rejection of the second reading of the 
Women's Suffrage Bill, second readings, like the oaths 
of the profane, had come to be absolutely without signifi- 
cance, and the blocking of the Bill beyond this stage had 
been assured long before by the tactics of Mr. Redmond, 
whose passion for justice, like Mr. Asquith's passion for 
popular government, is so curiously monosexual. The 
only discount from the Union's winnings is that it gave 
mendacious M. P.'s, anxious to back out of Women's 
Suffrage, a soft bed to he on. 

One should perhaps also add to the debit side of the 
account a considerable loss of popularity on the part of 
the suffragettes, a loss which would become complete were 
window-breaking to pass into graver crimes, and which 
would entirely paralyze the effect of their tactics. 

For the tactics of the prison and the hunger-strike depend 
for their value upon the innocency of the prisoners. Their 
offence must be merely nominal or technical. The suffra- 
gettes had rediscovered the Quaker truth that the spirit 
is stronger than all the forces of Government, and that 
things may really come by fasting and prayer. Even the 
window-breaking, though a perilous approach to the meth- 
ods of the Pagan male, was only a damage to insensitive 
material, for which the window-breakers were prepared to 
pay in conscious suffering. But once the injury was done 
to flesh and blood, the injurer when punished would only 
be paying tooth for tooth; and all the sympathy would go, 
not to the assailant, but to the victim. Mrs. Pankhurst 



292 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

says the Government must either give votes to women or 
"prepare to send large numbers of women to penal servi- 
tude." That would be indeed awkward for the Govern- 
ment if penal servitude were easily procurable. Unfortu- 
nately, the women must first qualify for it, and their crimes 
would disembarrass the Government. Mrs. Leigh could 
have been safely left to starve had her attempted action of 
that threat really come off, especially with loss of life. Thus 
violence may be "militant," but it is not "tactics," and 
violence against society at large is peculiarly tactless. 
George Fox would hardly occupy so exalted a niche in 
history if he had used his hammer to make not shoes but 
corpses. 

The suffragettes who run amok have, in fact, become 
the victims of their own vocabulary. Their Union was 
"militant," but a church militant, not an army militant. 
The Salvation Army might as well suddenly take to shoot- 
ing the heathen. It was only by mob misunderstanding 
that the suffragettes were conceived as viragoes, just as 
it was only by mob misunderstanding that the members 
of the Society of Friends were conceived as desperadoes. 
If it cannot be said that their proceedings were as quintes- 
sentially peaceful as some of those absolutely mute Quaker 
meetings which the police of Charles II humorously enough 
broke up as "riots," yet they had a thousand propaganda 
meetings (ignored by the Press) to one militant action 
(recorded and magnified). Even in battle nothing could 
be more decorous or constitutional than the overwhelming 
majority of their "pinpricks." 

I remember a beautiful young lady, faultlessly dressed, 
who in soft, musical accents interrupted Mr. Birrell at the 
Mansion House. Stewards hurled themselves at her, po- 
licemen hastened from every point of the compass; but 
unruffled as at the dinner-table, without turning a hair 



AWKWARD AGE OF THE WOMEN S MOVEMENT 293 

of her exquisite chevelure, she continued gently explaining 
the wishes of womankind till she disappeared in a whirl- 
wind of hysteric masculinity. But in gradually succumb- 
ing to the vulgar misunderstanding, playing up to the 
caricature, and finally assimilating to the crude and ob- 
solescent methods of men, the suffragettes have been 
throwing away their own peculiar glory, their characteristic 
contribution to history and politics. Rosalind in search 
of a vote has supplied humanity with a new type who 
snatched from her testifyings a grace beyond the reach of 
Arden. But Rosalind with a revolver would be merely a 
reactionary. Hawthorne's Zenobia, who, for all her eman- 
cipation, drowned herself in a fit of amorous jealousy, was 
no greater backslider from the true path of woman's ad- 
vancement. It is some relief to find that Mrs. Pankhurst's 
latest programme disavows attacks upon human life, limit- 
ing itself to destruction of property, and that the Pethick 
Lawrences have grown still saner. 

There might, indeed, be — I have already admitted — 
some excuse and even admiration for the Terrorist, did 
the triumph of her cause appear indefinitely remote, were 
even that triumph to be brought perceptibly nearer by 
forcibly feeding us with horrors. But the contrary is the 
case: even the epidemic of crime foreshadowed by Mrs. 
Pankhurst could not appreciably delay Women's Suffrage. 
It is coming as fast as human nature and the nature of the 
Parliamentary machine will allow. To try to terrorize Mr. 
Asquith into bringing in a Government measure is to credit 
him with a wisdom and a nobility almost divine. No man 
is great enough to put himself in the right by admitting he 
was wrong. And even if he were great enough to admit 
it under argument, he would have to be god-like to admit 
it under menace. Rather than admit it, Mr. Asquith has 
let himself be driven into a position more ludicrous than 



294 THE WAR F0R THE WORLD 

perhaps any Prime Minister has occupied. For though 
he declares Women's Suffrage to be "a political disaster 
of the gravest kind," he is ready to push it through if the 
House of Commons wishes, relying for its rejection upon the 
House of Lords which he has denounced and enfeebled. 
He is even not unwilling it shall pass if only the dis- 
aster to the country is maximized by Adult Suffrage. It 
is not that he loves woman more, but the Tory party 
less. 

But although Mr. Asquith cannot be expected to take 
the one short step between the ridiculous and the sublime 
and bring in a Women's Reform Bill, yet it is not unlikely 
he will do what the suffragettes demand by dropping his 
Men's Reform Bill, if only on the ground of time. It is 
difficult to see how that and Home Rule and Welsh Dis- 
establishment can be squeezed into one session. If the 
Reform Bill is dropped, the ground will be open again for 
some sort of Conciliation Bill, since the demand for Adult 
Female Suffrage is only an angry appendix to the male 
measure. It is just possible that Women's Suffrage may 
first appear in these islands by way of a clause in the Home 
Rule Bill, and this Irish entrance by a side-door would be 
peculiarly English, dodging as it does the main issue of 
women's claim to vote in Imperial affairs. But already 
there is talk of withdrawing this amendment in return for 
some more or less shadowy promises from Mr. Redmond; 
it is in any case obnoxious to the Irish, and the only real 
way for this Parliament would seem to lie through a Con- 
ciliation Bill like that originally proposed by Mr. Brailsford 
and " torpedoed " at the eleventh hour by Mr. Lloyd George. 
There is no reason, however, to suppose that Mr. Lloyd 
George would be less hostile to such a measure than before, 
especially as the only measure that could be carried after 
this session must be so narrow as to ensure its acceptance 



AWKWARD AGE OF THE WOMEN S MOVEMENT 295 

by the House of Lords. The Parliamentary struggle over 
Female Suffrage is less a struggle against it than a competi- 
tion for its spoils. Each party is striving to annex the 
balance of the inevitable female electorate. But as no 
measure can possibly be devised to favor both parties, or 
even to equalize their winnings, the prospects of a Concilia- 
tion Bill scarcely survive analysis. Hence Christabel Pank- 
hurst, that shrewd practical politician who is giving up 
to womankind what was meant for party, has long since 
waved aside all Conciliation Bills and clauses and demands 
a Government measure. But Mr. Brailsford and his faith- 
ful band of M. P.'s, together with Mrs. Fawcett and her 
National Union, are — despite the known destructive de- 
signs of the Nationalists — patiently pursuing the ever- 
lessening hope of a conciliatory clause in an ever-receding 
Reform Bill. At the same time, taking a lesson from the 
militant camp, Mrs. Fawcett's Union has started a fight- 
ing fund to "keep the Liberal out" at certain by- 
elections where a Labor member can be put up to split 
the Liberal vote. The profit of these tactics seems less 
to the Women's Movement than to the Tory and Labor 
parties, neither of which pledges itself to anything in 
return. 1 

All things considered, I am afraid the Suffrage Movement 
will have to make up its mind to wait for the next Parlia- 
ment. There is more hope for the premature collapse of 
this Parliament than for its passing of a Suffrage Bill or 
clause. And at the general election, whenever it comes, 
Votes for Women will be put on the programme of both 
parties, The Conservatives will offer a mild dose, the Lib- 

1 "Mr. Zangwill misconceives the nature of the relation between the Na- 
tional Union and the Labor Party," wrote Mrs. Fawcett in the next number 
of the Fortnightly. "It is emphatically not of the nature of a bargain." 
But surely this is exactly what is here said. 



296 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

erals a democratic. Whichever fails at the polls, the princi- 
ple of Women's Suffrage will be safe. 1 

This prognostic, it will be seen, involves the removal of 
the immovable Asquith. But he must either consent to 
follow a plebiscite of his party or retire, like his doorkeeper, 
from Downing Street, under the intolerable burden of the 
suffragette. Much as his party honors and admires him, 
it cannot continue to repudiate the essential principles of 
Liberalism, nor find refuge in his sophism that Liberal- 
ism removes artificial barriers, but cannot remove natural 
barriers. What natural barrier prevents a woman from 
accepting or rejecting a man who proposes to represent 
her in Parliament? No; after his historic innings Mr. 
Asquith will sacrifice himself and retire, covered with laurels 
and contradictions. 2 Pending which event, the suffragettes, 
while doing their best to precipitate it through the down- 
fall of the Government, may very reasonably continue 
their policy of pinpricks to keep politicians from going to 
sleep, but serious violence would be worse than a crime, 
it would be a blunder. No general dares throw away his 
men when nothing is to be gained, and our analysis shows 
that the interval between women and the vote can only be 
shortened by bringing on a general election. 

There are, indeed, sceptics who fear that even at the 
next general election both parties may find a way of cir- 
cumventing Women's Suffrage by secretly agreeing to keep 
it off both programmes; but the country itself is too sick 
of the question to endure this, even if the Women's Lib- 

1 This prophecy still holds the field, though the present Parliament has 
been unconscionably long a-dying. The Reform Bill was withdrawn as 
prophesied. 

2 It now looks as if through the war Mr. Asquith has found the light, 
for he has promised Mrs. Fawcett that the question shall be " fully and 
impartially weighed without any prejudgment from the controversies of the 
past." 



AWKWARD AGE OF THE WOMEN S MOVEMENT 297 

eral Federation and the corresponding Conservative body 
permitted it. That the parties would go so far as to pair 
off their women workers against each other is unlikely. 
At any rate, now, when other forms of agitation are more 
or less futile, is the moment for these and cognate bodies 
to take up the running. 

But even if these women workers fail in backbone, and 
allow themselves, as so often before, to be lulled and gulled 
by their male politicians, there yet remains an ardent 
body to push forward their cause. Mrs. Humphry Ward 
and the Anti-Suffragists may be trusted to continue tireless 
and ever-inventive. Mrs. Ward's league to promote the 
return of women as town and county councillors is her 
latest device to prove the unfitness of women for public 
affairs, and since the Vegetarian League for combating the 
carnivorous instincts of the tigress by feeding her with blood, 
there has been no quite so happy adaptation of means to 
end. If anything could add to the educative efficiency of 
the new league, it is Mrs. Ward's scrupulousness in limiting 
it exclusively to Anti-Suffragists. 



THE MILITANT SUFFRAGISTS 



[From the English Review, November, 1913] 

" When lawless mobs insult the Court 
That man shall be my boast, 
If breaking windows be the sport, 
Who bravely breaks the most. — Cowper." 



The Women's Social and Political Union, the most 
troublesome institution of modern times, was founded in 
October, 1903. It has, therefore, just completed a decade 
of activity — of activity unparalleled and exuberant, rich 
in comedy and tragedy, in heroism and flamboyance — and 
it is high time the public should cease gasping and come to a 
just comprehension of what is passing under its nose. Part 
of its hebetude is due to the Press, which leads it by that 
nose, and which, since the days when Milton looked to it 
for the safeguarding of liberty and justice, has become a 
medium of organized misinformation, so unreliable that 
one cannot even wholly disbelieve it. Albert Hall mass- 
meetings, with every seat paid for, have been edited away, 
while with equal cynicism trivial incidents have been spiced 
to the humor of the mob. King Demos, like other monarchs, 
hears only what tickles the royal ear. In their wonderfully 
organized campaigns at by-elections — at which they have 
generally hired all the halls and commandeered the best 
street pitches before the other side has quite realized there 
is a contest — the Suffragettes have held as many as two 

298 



THE MILITANT SUFFRAGISTS 299 

hundred public meetings in a single week. In the ordinary 
propaganda of the Union, the number of platform or draw- 
ing-room meetings has reached a hundred a day in London 
alone. Flower-festivals, bazaars, plays, caravan- tours, 
processions, bands — what form of picturesque persuasion 
has it left untried, where have its cohorts not come gleaming 
in purple, white and green? Hyde Park has known them, 
and Trafalgar Square, music-halls and village greens, the 
town mansions of peeresses and the drawing-rooms of the 
provincial bourgeoisie; they have even scandalized the 
faithless by praying a real prayer in Westminster Abbey. 
Yet, when a journalist wrote that their treasurer had in- 
vested their funds in bonds, the compositor automatically 
put it "bombs." 

At the recent Medical Congress in London, a Scotch 
doctor strove to class their militancy with the dancing or 
other maniacal epidemics of the fourteenth century: he 
himself was suffering from contagious misunderstanding. 
Said an elderly schoolmistress to the jury that was trying 
her this spring on the charge of window-breaking: "I think 
that all of you would look forward with dread to forcible 
feeding as carried on in our prisons. Well, I declare to you 
that the idea of lifting my hand in cool determination to 
destroy was a more dreadful idea than that of forcible 
feeding. You little know how we women have to screw up 
our courage to acting point." Such a militancy is, indeed, 
too rational to be formidable. It is of the brain, not of the 
fist. So far from being hysterical, it has been turned on and 
off like a tap. In periods of false promises from politicians, 
there have been truces more faithfully observed than any 
in the Balkans. 

But at first it was not even a cerebral militancy. It was 
as metaphorical as the Salvation Army. In the over- 
whelming majority of instances, the operations of this un- 



300 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

precedented Union have been devoid of all violence save 
that inflicted on its members by the Government, the police, 
and the mob. Even when it strove to supplement its 
constitutional agitation by illegal acts, its breaches of law 
were long merely technical or symbolical, designed to em- 
barrass the Government by a plethora of prisoners, and to 
achieve the advertisement denied to a peaceful propaganda. 
When, finally, a handful of desperate spirits proclaimed a 
guerilla war against society, it was merely against dead 
matter, and it is amazing that, with so many fanatics 
smarting under almost intolerable tortures and indignities, 
not one has lost her balance so far as to destroy life. The 
women's war remains unstained by blood other than their 
own. They have been stoned and beaten, ducked in horse- 
ponds, obscenely maltreated, imprisoned in the third class 
with drunkards and pickpockets, sentenced to penal servi- 
tude, loathsomely fed by tubes and pumps. Captain Scott, 
perishing in the Antarctic snows for lack of food, was less 
essentially heroic and no greater a pioneer than Miss 
Wallace-Dunlop, the fragile inventress of the hunger- 
strike, starving with luxuries heaped beseechingly around 
her. It is impossible not to think of the temptation in the 
wilderness. The thirst-strike and the sleep-strike push the 
doctrine of "Entbehren sollst" to extremes undreamed of by 
Goethe. In an age of luxury and materialism almost un- 
exampled, amid an epidemic of negroid dancing that might 
well have occupied the Scotch doctor, we have witnessed 
the miracle of prison-doors flying open by force of faith 
and self-sacrifice. The great saying of Zwinglius: "You 
can kill the body, but not the soul," has received al- 
most incredible illustration. It is not too much to say 
that the Suffragettes have enlarged our conception of 
human nature and of the pitifulness of politics and poli- 
ticians. 



THE MILITANT SUFFRAGISTS 301 

II 

u You approve of votes for women!" a famous American 
exclaimed to me. "That kind of vote?" By a figure of 
speech yet unclassed in treatises on rhetoric, he had mixed 
up the end with the means, the ballot-paper with the 
match-box. Had he attended a Suffragette meeting at the 
Albert Hall, he would have found the "kind of vote" quite 
other — some ten thousand souls of all social classes sitting 
prim as Elia's Quakers, spellbound by a simple little wo- 
man in black, and waking only to pour at her feet their 
gold, their checks, their jewelry, the profits of hawking the 
paper in the wintry streets, the little hoard saved for a 
summer holiday, even the week's Old Age Pension. The 
collection at the last assembly — after the Government had 
left the Union for dead — -was fifteen thousand pounds, sub- 
scribed in a few minutes. These gatherings have been the 
communions of a new religion that has already its ritual, its 
hymnology, its sacred music, its symbolism (the broad- 
arrows of the prison garb its proudest emblem), its pa- 
geantry, its martyrology, and its dogma of Pankhurst 
infallibility. 

"I look upon myself on these occasions," said Mrs. 
Pankhurst, "not as a chairman, but as a general reviewing 
his troops." From a burning faith to a faith in burning, the 
transition — as all male history proves — is facile. But 
Mrs. Pankhurst did not begin as a soldier. Her military 
status has been a gradual growth, unforeseen by herself. 
The journals of 1891 record that at the funeral of Charles 
Bradlaugh, a deputation from a "Women's Franchise 
League" was among the many that brought wreaths, and 
that it consisted of the Countess Schach, Mrs. Herbert 
Burroughs, and Mrs. Pankhurst. And when I once strove 
to mitigate her growing bellicosity by telling her how 



302 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

sympathetically the Lord Chancellor had spoken at a 
dinner-party, she burst out: "Don't talk to me of Haldane! 
Twenty years ago he was our League's representative in 
Parliament!" Twenty years ago ! I was silenced. Along 
period of obscure labor — the spade-work so glibly recom- 
mended, but so often as fruitless as the sexton's — evidently 
lay behind this explosive phase: the genesis and collapse of 
Leagues and efforts untold. The great little lady, who, on 
her husband's death, had supported herself and her family 
as a Registrar of Births and Deaths, had had many a birth 
and death of scheme and dream to register in the annals of 
her cause before there came into being at her house in 
Manchester that W. S. P. U. which will surely live to 
record its victory. Her own birthday was the anniversary 
of the fall of the Bastille. That has not counted for nothing 
in so imaginative a temperament. 

Ill 

Most of the pioneers of the W. S. P. U. were Manchester 
working women — one, Annie Kenney, a mill-hand, who, as 
a half-timer of ten, had had a finger torn off by the ma- 
chinery — and the new gospel was preached at the "wakes" 
or local Lancashire fairs. Militancy, even metaphorical, 
was unthought of. The first sparks of that were, strangely 
enough, struck out at the Free Trade Hall by the flintiness 
of one of the oldest supporters of Women's Suffrage, Sir 
Edward Grey. Prophesying, in October, 1905, the over- 
throw of the Conservatives at the coming General Election, 
he yet refused to say what would be the attitude of a 
Liberal Government to "Votes for Women." The question 
had even (by request) been put into peaceful writing, and 
signed "Annie Kenney, Member of the Oldham Com- 
mittee of the Card and Blowing-Room Operatives." The 



THE MILITANT SUFFRAGISTS 303 

humble mill-hand rose as the monster meeting was closing, 
and insisted on a reply. Here again a great pioneering deed 
was done, destined to find imitations and reverberations 
innumerable. Sir Edward Grey was silent, but it was Annie 
Kenney who stood upon a peak in Darien. 

Those who know the temper of a political meeting at a 
passionate crisis will appreciate the almost superhuman 
courage needed for a girl to get up and traverse it. The 
vast gathering of Liberals, hoarse from cheering the doc- 
trines of liberty and equality, howled at the frail little 
figure, stewards precipitated themselves upon her. It was 
at this moment that Christabel Pankhurst leapt into history. 
She sprang up, threw one arm round her friend, and warded 
off the hysterical males with the other. They scratched and 
tore at her hands till, as her sister Sylvia records, "the 
blood ran down on Annie's hat, which lay on the seat, and 
stained it red." 

Expelled from the meeting, the two girls tried to form 
one of their own outside. Charged with "obstruction and 
assaulting the police," and refusing to pay a fine, they 
were thrown into jail, dressed in serge, and fed on skilly. 
In that prison the real W. S. P. U. was born. The same 
Free Trade Hall that had howled down the questioners 
was packed to fete the ex-prisoners. Thus is persecution 
ever the pillar of the Church. 

Annie Kenney, abandoning her clogs, except for cere- 
monial occasions, set out to rouse London — with two 
pounds in her pocket. Little Mrs. Drummond, the wife 
of an impecunious upholsterer, a cheery, humorsome 
Scotch body, plump of person and prodigious of voice — 
the Madame Sans Gene of the movement, destined also 
to become its field-marshal — joined her with a borrowed 
typewriter. The Pankhursts, too, migrated to the capital. 
And, one wonderful day, they found the propertied Pethick 



304 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

Lawrences, the able barrister and his brilliant and beautiful 
wife, self-consecrated from girlhood to social service, and 
oddly bearing the same Christian name as Mrs. Pankhurst. 
The new Emmeline became the Honorary Treasurer, and 
from that moment the fledgling Union was feathered and 
winged and taloned. 

Among the more noteworthy of the early recruits were 
Theresa Billington, a young school-teacher with brains 
and looks, Mrs. Despard, the septuagenarian sister of 
General French, not inferior to him in dash and brio, and 
Mrs. Baines, who had been a Salvation Army captain, and 
was now the wife of a journeyman bootmaker. Gradually, 
figures like Mrs. Ayrton, the scientist, Miss Ethel Smyth, 
the composer, Miss Beatrice Harraden, the novelist, began 
to appear on the same platform with Lady Constance 
Lytton, the Countess Russell, and Mrs. Walker, the elo- 
quent Poplar laundress. And, gradually, it began to 
be understood that a suffragette was not necessarily an 
elderly spectacled female; the type even changed in Punch 
to a pretty girl. But the notion that the suffragette is a 
neurotic spinster is inexpugnable. It has even survived 
the discovery that some of the fiercest of the militants are 
married men — unique exemplars of the fabular chivalry 
of man. 

IV 

In 1870 Mrs. Pankhurst's husband had drafted a measure 
which, under the name of the Women's Disabilities Re- 
moval Bill, was introduced into Parliament by John Bright's 
brother, and passed its second reading by a majority of 
thirty-three. It is a pity the long-due Reform was not 
carried in this negative shape, for the cry of "Votes for 
Women" accentuates the opposition of sex rather than the 
common citizenship, and whereas the motive power of the 



THE MILITANT SUFFRAGISTS 305 

suffrage movement had been woman's consciousness of her 
own dignity, it is becoming more and more her conscious- 
ness of man's indignity. Man has failed to run things 
decently. There must be "joint housekeeping." Woman 
must help man to set his house in order. "I, for one," 
cried Mrs. Pankhurst, "looking round on the sweated and 
decrepit members of my sex, say that men have had control 
of these things long enough." In particular, the "social 
evil" has entered into the suffragette consciousness, the 
veil of our compromise with polygamy has been lifted, and 
the sins of the male, assuredly great enough to be safe 
from exaggeration, have been magnified by taking the 
abnormal for the average. Woman's place in our matri- 
monial system was represented much as the West repre- 
sents her place in the Oriental scheme, or as Mark Twain's 
Yankee described the Court of King Arthur, with all the 
facts and little of the truth. If a minute minority forthwith 
demanded equal immorality with man, its organ, the Free- 
woman, was not destined to exemplify the survival of the 
unfittest, and by the vast majority the vote is regarded as 
the great instrument of social purification. It is even to 
abolish venereal disease. The example of Suffrage coun- 
tries is cited to show how the age of consent has everywhere 
been raised, drunkenness abated, and child-life saved. 
Thus every day that goes by without the vote means the 
degradation of souls and bodies innumerable, and a very 
massacre of innocents. Hence this ardor of self-sacrifice, 
hence the religious exaltation. 

Annie Kenney's deed of derring-do came like a trumpet- 
call to the Millennium. "Here at last is action!" cried 
Mrs. Pethick Lawrence, and a thousand devotees rushed 
into it. Heckling became a fine art, and even a joyous; 
for, despite all the suffering it cost them, they carried it 
through with such inexhaustible spirit and invention as 



306 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

to restore a touch of chic and bravado to our drab life and 
add to the gaiety of nations. Miss Pankhurst even man- 
aged to badger Cabinet Ministers in the witness-box. Why- 
interjection was invariably answered by ejection, why 
petitions legitimate to men were punished with sentences 
deemed sufficient for men's worst assaults on women, is a 
mystery. But if denunciations of arson leave the Suf- 
fragette cold, it is because the vocabulary of vituperation 
had been exhausted over a phase which now looms to us 
as sedate as an Impressionist picture in a Futurist exhibi- 
tion. Parliament actually passed a Bill to protect public 
meetings from her — a measure which, like every other 
hatched against her, has been a still-born monstrosity. 
There was no meeting, however guarded, to which, by 
hook or crook, organ-pipe or drain-pipe, she did not gain 
admission, padlocking herself against easy expulsion, while, 
even were her bodily presence averted, always, like the 
horns of Elfland faintly blowing, came from some well- 
placed megaphone that inevitable and implacable slogan, 
which, chalked on pavements or scrawled on walls or 
blazoned on sky-signs, became a universal and ubiquitous 
obsession. Steamers carried it under the terrace of Parlia- 
ment, or balloons suspended it from above. Cabinet 
Ministers were dogged to their privatest haunts, for the 
leakages of information were everywhere. Since Chris- 
tianity, no such force had arisen to divide families. No 
household, however Philistine, was safe from a jail-bird. 
If Lady Anon asked Lady Alamode when her daughter 
was coming out, it no longer referred to the young lady's 
debut. The most obstinate autocrat since Pharaoh, Mr. 
Asquith has been shown similar signs and wonders. "We 
are the appointed plagues," said Mrs. Pankhurst, with 
a rare touch of humor. And nothing has plagued British 
Society more than that outbreak of religion which brought 



THE MILITANT SUFFRAGISTS 307 

disgrace upon so many respectable homes. Incidentally, 
the prisons and the courts were improved by receiving critics 
instead of criminals. "We do not care for ourselves," cried 
Christabel Pankhurst at the London Police Court, "because 
prison is nothing to us. But the injustice done here to 
thousands of helpless creatures is too terrible to contem- 
plate." Warders and wardresses, too, profited by the 
society of their new prisoners. It was like a rise in the 
social scale to them. Nor was even the Bench immune 
from education. 

"Boyle!" called the magistrate. "Miss Boyle," cor- 
rected the prisoner. "We always call prisoners by their 
surnames," explained the magistrate. "We are here to 
teach you better manners," said the Suffragette. 

V 

Simultaneously with these constitutional tactics there 
had gone a political militancy, equally constitutional. 
"The Liberal Government refuses the vote — turn the 
Liberal out," was the simple formula, and so at every 
by-election the W. S. P. U. worked against the Government 
candidate. He might be an old and tried Suffragist. The 
Conservative candidate might be an old and scurrilous 
anti-Suffragist. No matter. The laws of the Medes and 
Pankhursts do not change. 

It was Christabel, LL.B., to whom this policy was due. 
She had become the political chief of the movement, and 
her record proves that woman, not man, is the logical 
animal. Unfortunately, in politics we have to do, not with 
the logical, but the psychological. The public, exhorted by 
her to vote for anti-Suffragists and to overthrow Suffragists, 
became utterly confused. It has not the clarity of brain 
of a Bachelor of Laws. The demand for Women's Suffrage 



308 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

was already sufficiently obscure. To pursue obscurum 
per obscurius could only occur to a novice in affairs. To 
make the public's confusion worse confounded, the rival 
Suffragists of Mrs. Fawcett's National Union would be 
imploring it to support the candidate denounced by the 
Suffragettes. Either policy has its points. Together they 
were suicidal. Both factions would have done better to 
pair and leave the constituency. 

The electorate thus bemused stolidly followed its own 
political interests. Indeed, to expect it to give them all 
up for women was fantastic. In a close election the Suf- 
fragettes might hope to turn a few waverers, but even 
if their exhaustless energies triumphed, their part was 
obscured, not always wilfully, in the confusion of electoral 
issues. In the few instances where the issue was more or 
less isolated, the women's candidate was hopelessly defeated. 

Within Parliament as little impression was made as 
at the polls. Mrs. Fawcett's alliance with the Labor Party, 
dubious enough at best, was neutralized by the Pankhurst 
opposition to the Labor Party. The Women's Liberal 
Federation, the sole instrument that could have brought 
effective pressure on the Government, was divided. Wom- 
an's disunion is man's domination. No Minister would 
stake his fortunes on Women's Suffrage, and M. P.'s are 
peculiarly sluggish towards changes in the Franchise, 
which force them to face a new and uncertain electorate. 
Such as favored the Reform were more concerned it should 
benefit their party than womanhood, so that, though the 
abstract principle has commanded a composite majority 
since 1886, no possible measure could be framed to satisfy 
both parties. Is it surprising if the Parliamentary history 
of Women's Suffrage reads like a fantasia by Boz on the 
arts of circumlocution and "How not to do it"? Seven 
times it has passed its second reading. The culminating 



THE MILITANT SUFFRAGISTS 309 

comedy when Asquith blundered like a beginner, and the 
Speaker, by not speaking, misled Parliament and the 
country, goes beyond anything in Dickens. 

Despairing of the force of argument, the Suffragettes 
turned to the argument of force. They were outside the 
constitution. Very well, they would be outside the law. 
A specious logic showed that Reform Bills had only been 
carried in 1832, in 1867, and in 1884, and that, in every 
case, they had been preceded by riots. That other riots 
(e. g., the Chartist) had not been followed by Reform Bills 
was overlooked. That riots are to the riotous sex was also 
forgotten. Stones thrown by logic-ridden schoolmistresses 
are not the true volcanic jet that sobers statesmen. To 
soften still further the force of the stones, they were thrown, 
not at Government windows in particular, but at the plate 
glass of the public in general. The injured shopkeepers 
would put pressure on the Government — they would rise 
as one woman to demand Women's Suffrage. So ran the 
Pankhurst syllogism. But that is not the psychology of 
"the nation of shopkeepers." There was method in the 
madness, but the public saw only madness in the method. 
Yet the Pankhurst logic did not flinch. "How far shall 
you go?" Mrs. Pankhurst was asked. "Just as far as 
we are driven," was the question-begging reply. And so 
acids were poured into letter-boxes or upon golf greens, 
telegraph lines were cut, fire-engines were called out on 
false alarms. A grave psychological change took place in 
Mrs. Pankhurst, and found expression in a public ejacula- 
tion. "One thing we thank men for — and that is for teach- 
ing us the joy of battle." The woman, who in 1906 had 
feared that women could not be got to walk through a 
few streets, did not fear in 191 2 to invite them to arson. 
It is "Black Friday" that marks the turning-point in 
Suffragette psychology. In November, 1910, a deputation 



3IO THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

to the Premier had been so grievously and obscenely han- 
dled by the crowd and by the imported East End police — 
whose conduct the House of Commons steadily refused to 
investigate — that it was resolved henceforward to incon- 
venience oneself as little and society as seriously as possible. 

VI 

That a women's political movement would take different 
shape from a male movement might have been anticipated. 
Force would, of course, be banished, the policy would be 
as shifting as the weathercock, while seduction and cajolery 
would reduce male diplomacy to a coarse bungling. The 
exact contrary has been the case. The simplest diplomacy 
has been banished; even ordinary politeness. "You're 
a liar," said Mrs. Drummond to Lloyd George, when 
admitted to a friendly interview. Whereas men would 
have made the most of Mr. Asquith's little progressions 
and persuaded him that he was practically arrived — if, 
indeed, he had not always been there — the women have 
pushed him violently backwards. Instead of saving his 
face, they have slapped it. Nor did it profit a Minister to 
be on their side. He merely added hypocrisy to the crime 
of his colleagues. The sole method of the campaign has 
been the frontal attack, and it has been pursued with an 
unswervingness that has more of natural law than of hu- 
man elasticity. People have talked of militant tactics. 
There have been no tactics. There has been only mili- 
tancy. When Mr. Lloyd George addressed an audience 
of Liberal women on Women's Suffrage, an invading body 
of Suffragettes denied him a hearing, though the only 
raison d'etre of interruptions was that Ministers were evad- 
ing the subject. According to the rules of war, urged Mrs. 
Pethick Lawrence, an enemy taking cover among neutrals 



THE MILITANT SUFFRAGISTS 311 

may be pursued there. But "may" is not "must." That 
your volley may damage your own side more than the 
enemy, that you make bad blood between fellow-suffragists, 
that you confuse the country and rob it of Mr. Lloyd 
George's powerful speech on your behalf — -all this is nothing. 
The law of Minister-baiting is inviolable. 

The traveller up the Alpine railway knows how the line 
zigzags with wrigglings innumerable, how frequently it 
goes back on itself, passing and repassing the same point, 
though always on a higher level; how it even disappears 
for a time in a tunnel. But Christabel Pankhurst will only 
go straight up her mountain — tunnelling is peculiarly 
anathema. That would be well enough if she could com- 
mand the funiculaire of military force. But her physical 
force is even smaller than her political. Both are just 
sufficient for vivid advertisement, but her challenges in 
both to the Government approach megalomania. "Seize 
the mace," she cried in a Suffragette rush on the House, 
"and you will be the Cromwells of the twentieth century." 
She overlooked Cromwell's musketeers. Even Joan of 
Arc had the army of France behind her, not her fellow- 
maidens. At the head of a party in the House, Miss Pank- 
hurst would have rivalled Parnell ; with the Labor Party 
she could do infinitely more than Mr. Ramsay Macdonald. 
For the combinations of Parliamentary atoms she has a 
wonderful flair. But what is the use of divining the enemy's 
movements when all you can do is to commit hari-kari 
on his doorstep? Since the Children's Crusade of 1212, 
there has been no such blend of the ridiculous and the 
sublime as the war against England declared by logic- 
ridden ladies. Their attempts to intimidate the nation 
have the pathetic futility of Don Quixote's tiltings. A 
nation, especially ours, takes a good deal of terroriz- 
ing. The fire-insurance societies soon accommodate them- 



312 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

selves to the new risk. It is only because there has been 
no war on British soil for over a century that Britons 
have been so startled by burnings and harryings ineffably 
trivial, compared with real war-horrors. But John Bull 
has not called for Women's Suffrage: on the contrary, the 
sleeping dogs of hooliganism have been aroused. The 
dread of riots undoubtedly keyed up the debates in the 
House to an intensity unknown during the forty years of 
Parliamentary flirtation with the Woman Question. But 
the House did not surrender. 

The real damage inflicted by Miss Pankhurst is not 
physical. In Mrs. Gaskell's great novel, North and South, 
Margaret Hale, turning upon the mill-owner who has 
dared to propose to her because she rescued him from 
his strikers, cries out: "Any woman worthy the name of 
woman would come forward to shield with her reverenced 
helplessness a man in danger from the violence of num- 
bers." "Reverenced helplessness!" That is no small 
asset in the turmoil of life, however imperfect the ideal. 
The destruction of this asset, as well as of the asset of re- 
spect for law and order, for statesmen and magistrates, 
is a grievous wound to the State: 

" We do it wrong, being so majestical 
To offer it the show of violence." 

Says Imlac in Rasselas, "Man cannot so far know the 
connection of causes and events as that he may venture 
to do wrong in order to do right. When we pursue our 
end by lawful means, we may always console our mis- 
carriage by the hope of future recompense. When we 
consult only our own policy and attempt to find a nearer 
way to good by overleaping the settled boundaries of right 
and wrong, we cannot be happy even by success, because 
we cannot escape the consciousness of our fault; but if 



THE MILITANT SUFFRAGISTS 313 

we miscarry, the disappointment is irretrievably embit- 
tered." 

Militancy may not have put back the clock of suffrage, 
but it has put back the clock of civilization. 

But, if anything could excuse the militants, it is the 
taunt of a Cabinet Minister that he saw no such ebullition 
of popular feeling as had burnt down Nottingham Castle. 
Mr. Hobhouse was perfectly correct. But how inconceiv- 
able of a Liberal statesman to weigh a cause by its vio- 
lence! "From the moment Mr. Hobhouse's speech was 
delivered," Mrs. Pethick Lawrence told the jury this June, 
"women began to feel that self-sacrifice was futile, that 
nothing could touch the hearts or conscience of legislators 
but . . . damage to property." 



VII 

Miss Christabel Pankhurst has taken her motto from 
Blake: 

"If the sun and moon should doubt, 
They'd immediately go out." 

She combines the spiritual assurance and practical genius 
of a St. Catherine of Siena with the determination of a 
hustler and the logic of a Bachelor of Laws. There is, 
perhaps, something of Manchester in her machine-like 
rigidity. But it gives her the invaluable quality of decision. 
And never was this quality exhibited more finely than in 
her handling (from her Paris exile) of the problem of bring- 
ing out the Suffragette when printer after printer was warned 
off by the Government. Her refusal to let the Labor Party 
print it was a master-stroke. 

Inferior to her mother as an orator, despite her vivacity 
and charm, and only occasionally touching the same high 



314 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

note of religious simplicity, she seems to have carried away 
the graver and greater figure by her cocksureness. It is 
the young generation kicking at the door. "When should 
the Government give us the vote?" "To-day!" That 
is the note of Christabel. That the Government would 
risk an internal crisis that might overthrow the still unstable 
results of many sessions, that the Irish and Labor Parties 
are only pursuing the same single-eyed system as herself, 
does not diminish her resentment at not being served first. 
There is nothing she despises so much as the M. P., she 
has told us, nor is Parliament a career she would ever 
contemplate. That sounds like a touch of masculine 
inconsequence, the one breach in the relentlessness of the 
female logic. 

In the internal conduct of the W. S. P. U., this relentless- 
ness has been as marked as in the external. With the 
transition to militancy went also a transition to military 
law, and the organization ceased to elect its officers. Autoc- 
racy was found the best means of promoting democracy. 
Of the original pioneers of the movement, only the working 
women have remained with the Pankhursts. Mrs. Despard 
founded the Freedom League, Miss Billington has become 
a critic. And not only were women sacrificed the moment 
their opinion ran counter to Christabel's, even the greatest 
friends in the House of Commons went unheeded, though 
it might have been thought they understood the machine 
better. Nay, even the two Emmelines were parted on the 
policy of arson. 

The Pethick Lawrences had been travelling in Canada, 
had seen fresh horizons, and, removed from the Pankhurst 
hypnosis, had readjusted their perspective. The split 
occurred at an unfortunate moment for Mrs. Pankhurst, 
when the cause was already overclouded, and the return of 
the Pethick Lawrences was the one patch of blue, and a 



THE MILITANT SUFFRAGISTS 315 

mighty audience waited in the Albert Hall to welcome 
them home. It was only a few minutes before the meeting 
that sinister rumors began to circulate — the color seemed 
to go out of the emblazoned banners. It was Mrs. Pank- 
hurst's formidable task to explain that she had ruthlessly 
shed the beloved Treasurer, that the very organ of the 
movement, Votes for Women, would be replaced by a raw 
new paper. The little woman stood alone on the platform, 
bereft even of Christabel. Never had she shown such 
greatness. A few simple sentences, crystalline in sound 
as in form, and the vast audience was hers again. In a few 
weeks the Suffragette had cut out the Pethick Lawrence 
paper as the official organ. But never a word of recrimina- 
tion has come from either side. Neither party has spoken 
of the other except in terms of regard. It is an episode for 
which you will find no parallel in male factions. 

VIII 

Hari-kari, the one resource of the Suffragettes, turns 
out to be their strongest weapon. Englishmen are not so 
brutish that they can bear the sight of martyred innocence. 
The heroic suicide of a lady of wealth and station on the 
public doorstep of the Derby is worth a wilderness of fires, 
and the cross that was borne before her body at the great 
funeral was a more victorious symbol than the hammer. 
Militancy is only successful in so far as it brings suffering 
to the militants. If this were a real war, could one say 
the greater their casualties the nearer their triumph? In 
war you menace the enemy with death. Mrs. Pankhurst 
is menacing the enemy with her own death. Even if we al- 
low the Government merely the wisdom of knowing that 
the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church, the 
fact that she is not allowed to die, even though Ministers 



316 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

are at their wits' ends to keep her and the law alive together, 
is a comforting reassurance of human progress. Four 
years ago Mrs. Pankhurst said in the dock: "Our words 
have always been — be patient, exercise self-restraint, show 
our so-called superiors that the criticism of women being 
hysterical is not true, use no violence, offer yourselves to 
the violence of others." Militancy was born out of despair 
of constitutionalism: out of despair of militancy, Mrs. 
Pankhurst has come back to the teaching of " Corinthians." 
Crime is now merely a cover for her hunger-strike. Her 
utter selflessness, the unbreakable energy of that frail body 
under the Cat-and-Mouse Bill (aptly compared to the Iron 
Maiden of the Middle Ages, whose iron spikes slowly 
squeezed out the life of the victim, — the noble eloquence 
which moved the prosecuting Attorney- General, Sir Rufus 
Isaacs, to tears — these are beginning to tell even on the 
clergy, always the last to recognize religion in its con- 
temporary vesture. Even bishops have demanded the 
death of the Cat-and-Mouse Bill, that bungle of benev- 
olence and barbarism devised in a panic to save the forms 
of Law, and carried finally through the House of Lords — 
whose function, according to Asquith, is to "impose delay" 
— in sixty seconds. But the Bill has been killed without 
prayers in aid. The prisoners have torn up their licenses 
or sold them by auction — Mrs. Pankhurst's fetched a 
hundred pounds. Some have escaped, some have refused 
to quit the cell. Mrs. Pankhurst — a convict under three 
years' hard labor — left England, like her fellow-politicians, 
when the House rose: to recuperate for a lecture campaign 
in America. The suppressed Suffragette has a larger cir- 
culation than ever. The officials of the W. S. P. U., so 
recently condemned to long terms of durance, are at their 
desks in Kingsway, calmly pursuing the "criminal" routine 
of the office. "There is no coercive measure within the 



THE MILITANT SUFFRAGISTS 317 

imagination of either men or devils," writes the Suffra- 
gette, "that the women of this Union cannot withstand, 
if not living, then dead." Yes, the Government lies para- 
lyzed and humiliated. 

It is magnificent, but it is not the vote. 

IX 

Podsnaps, posing as open-minded, prattle that women 
ought to have the vote — excepting the Suffragettes, who 
have clearly shown themselves unfitted. The contrary is 
the more rational course. Every militant has earned a 
hundred votes. The weakness of the argument from mar- 
tyrdom lies precisely in its irrelevance to the other women, 
the stodgy indifferentists or the angry Antis. But to impose 
freedom on those who would rather be slaves, like to impose 
insurance on those who would rather be feckless, is the 
task of Liberal statesmanship. To repudiate the task, 
to deny freedom even to those who demand it, is the nega- 
tion of Liberalism. That some Conservatives, too, favor 
Female Suffrage only shows how overdue it is. Even the 
Anti-Suffrage Society of Mrs. Humphry Ward demands 
municipal office for women. The vast transformations 
already effected in women's social, economic, and educa- 
tional status call, in fact, for a correlative political revolu- 
tion. To imagine it is " Votes for Women" that menaces 
the old order is to take the branch for the root. There is 
no anti-Suffragist M. P. — the Prime Minister not excluded 
— whose wife or daughter does not spout from political 
platforms. Not even Christabel Pankhurst is a keener 
politician than Mrs. Humphry Ward. 

The errors of political novices adventuring in unmapped 
territory, but offering their life for their cause, will seem 
small to posterity in comparison with the Liberal Leaders' 



318 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

sin against Liberalism. That the protagonist of the people, 
the historic over thrower of the Lords, should be the evil 
genius of the woman's movement, is a tragic paradox. 
Mr. Asquith is a statesman of grave and lofty conceptions 
and otherwise unblemished honesty, but his latest pose 
that there is little to be said on one side or the other is more 
amazing than his ancient antagonism. That was self- 
stultifying, but dignified; this is unpardonable frivolity. 
A recent cartoon in the Suffragette represents Justice as 
saying to him: "Why not give them the vote, and release 
me from tasks that are an outrage on my name?" And 
Mr. Asquith replies: "Now, enough of that, my woman, 
I've suspected all along you were on their side." If he did 
not suspect it all along, he suspects it now. And the public 
at large suspects it, and is more ready to receive Women's 
Suffrage than many a project which politicians palm off 
upon it. That Women's Suffrage will pass over the body 
of Mr. Asquith is one of the few certainties of the near 
future. 



PROLOGUE FOR A WOMEN'S THEATRE 

[Spoken by Miss Fay Davis at the Actresses' Fran- 
chise League Matinee on Friday, October 27, 191 1, 
Lyceum Theater] 

" Before the sunrise there must come the gray, 
So bear with me — the prologue to the play. 
Not mere diversion is our true intent. 
To whisper it — on politics we're bent. 
While preachers rarely to performance reach, 
We at one blow shall both perform and preach. 
You dreamed us dummies to fit dresses on, 
To prop heroic mask of Amazon, 
Princess or queen, ourselves but tailors' blocks, 
Or if with thoughts, then merely orthodox. 
Not so; behind our mask we keep our soul, 
Nor take our mimic world for the great whole. 
All noble causes tax our pence and prayers. 
Are all the men and women merely players, 
As Shakespeare said? Then players in their turn 
Are men and women who aspire and yearn. 
And is it true that all the world's a stage? 
Then we would act on that and on the age. 
And so we covet parts in that great play, 
For which the whole world is a stage to-day: 
That drama with a purpose finely human, 
To raise man higher by uplifting woman. 
We too demand by love and sacrifice 
To pay our quota of the grievous price 
Blind man exacts for setting woman free: 
Labors and pains no less than gold the fee, 
The scoff, the blow, the prison — worst of all, 
The bitter need like men to bawl and brawl. 
And wherefore, prithee, all this monstrous ransom? 
How is she not man's equal, save more handsome? 

319 



320 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

In Shakespeare's day, if Clio's voice be truth's, 

His heroines were played by beardless youths. 

Just fancy Rosalind a real male, 

Quaffing between the acts her stoup of ale, 

Or Perdita concealing manly art, 

Or Desdemona shaving for the part. 

Imagine some mere man for Ellen Terry — 

You might as well replace champagne by sherry. 

We've won equality upon the boards, 

But on the world-stage men are still the lords, 

Making sad mischief with their stupid swords. 

The time is out of joint — let's set it right 

Not whine and wail with Hamlet 'cursed spite.' 

That cry was merely masculine hysteria, 

For real statesmanship you need Egeria. 

But Hamlet was so hard soliloquizing, 

He had no ear for feminine advising. 

Ah, if instead of suicide-suggestion, 

To vote or not to vote had been the question, 

Ophelia had met with mocking flout, 

Hamlet's male insolence of sneer and doubt. 

Nunnery forsooth! When she at Hamlet's fat form 

Could thunder suffrage from the castle-platform! 

'The time is out of joint?' Then what's the cure? 

Joint work of men and women to be sure: 

Joint work to foster every noble growth, 

Joint work to make a better world for both. 

Refuse us this, let false friends trick the nation 

To burke the Bill that brings Conciliation. 

Then have at you, my lords, on with the fray. 

How long, Oh lords? Till woman has her way." 



THE WAR AND THE WOMEN 

" O Woman, in our hours of peace, 
At war with Parliament and Police, 
When Man it is that starts the row, 
The best munition-maker now." 

I. Woman as Worker 

It cannot be a mere coincidence that the war was made in 
Germany, the Male State in excelsis, where woman, in the 
Kaiser's favorite saying, must stick to her three K's — 
Kitchen, Kids, and Kirk, we may perhaps render it. 1 Not 
for her the glories of the Turnverein, the beatitude of the 
beer-hall, or the gospel of slashing the other cheek; not 
even the equality of the University. It is her lord alone 
that makes her the Mrs. Doctor or the Mrs. Professor. 

That to this status of the German woman, Armageddon 
may be due, is no fantastic speculation. For it is only by 
sheer absence of humor that Germany's brain could have 
tumefied with the notion of a Teutonic mission to mankind — 
by submarine and poison-gas — and absence of humor is 
directly traced by Meredith to contempt for the woman. 

"If the German men," he observed in his Essay on 
Comedy, "would consent to talk on equal terms with their 
women, and to listen to them, Comedy, or in any form, 
the Comic spirit will come to them." That is to say, 
women's corrective criticism would have brought propor- 
tion, and proportion is the mother of humor. But they have 

1 It seems an ironic nemesis that the moral of Germany should now be 
undermined by the disaffection of all these Kitchen-women, wailing for 
butter! 

321 



3 22 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

not listened to their women, and so (as by the bad fairy's 
gift at a christening) all the other delightful gifts of the 
race, all the music, science and philosophy, are spoiled. In 
place of humor—the dancing smile in the eyes of wisdom— 
the Teuton has only the grin of the gargoyle. "His irony," 
says Meredith, "is a missile of terrific tonnage; sarcasm 
he emits like a blast from the dragon's mouth. He must and 
will be Titan." 

If, then, his insolent isolation from feminine influence 
is the deepest cause of his swashbuckling temper, it follows 
that the position of women is not a factor of history to be 
lightly disregarded, nor one that fails to wreak its effects 
because historians and politicians neglect to take it into 
account. 

Electricians divide bodies by the resistance they offer to 
the passage of the electric current as calculated in""ohms." 
Humanity may be divided into classes by the resistance 
they offer to new ideas. The Americans, for example, 
have a small ohmage, the English a high. Judged by the 
evolution of their women, old countries like Sweden and 
Finland are less resistant than even the New World. In 
England woman has not moved a step in any direction with- 
out a hue and cry. Tragical is the story of the first medical 
pioneers, and equality with the man physican is even yet 
not won, though every new female doctor is now hailed as a 
godsend by the male millions engaged night and day in 
making work for her. 1 The "lost volts" is the pathetic 
name for the units of electric pressure wasted through re- 
sistance. What a ghastly waste of human force this British 
bulldoggedness is answerable for! 

1 There was (according to the Times) a very large increase in 1915 of 
medical and dental students. An enormous amount of work has been done 
under Government control by women in laboratories in the making of 
synthetic drugs and anti-toxins. They have also made airplanes and even 
worked out the difficult mathematical problems arising out of specifications. 



THE WAR AND THE WOMEN 323 

But sometimes in every country this ohmage of obstinacy 
is overwhelmed by sudden forces. Social evolution, which 
proceeds usually like the snail, proceeds at these moments 
like the kangaroo — "by leaps and bounds" — just as geologi- 
cal changes, which in normal times are imperceptibly slow, 
are sometimes cataclysmic. Such a volcanic upheaval 
has the war brought to women. In this transformation of 
the social landscape, the suffrage question has become a 
relatively insignificant landmark. 

The cause of woman's sudden rise in status is the discovery 
that, like the horse, she is not merely a domestic beast of 
burden, but may also be useful for war. In a passive sense, 
the discovery was not new. Did not Sir Walter Scott an- 
nounce it in his famous apostrophe to "Woman in our 
hours of ease?" Did not Victor Hugo glorify the French- 
women in the siege of Paris, who "gave to despairing 
combatants the encouragement of their smile, who refused, 
even before hunger, even before death, the surrender of 
their city? " But Patience smiling at grief, though it may be 
set on a monument, wins little real regard in the "man- 
made" world. Not even the active business services uni- 
versally rendered in France by Frenchwomen could rescue 
them from the insignificance attaching to a sex that merely 
creates and does not destroy. And in England, though 
Florence Nightingale practically saved our Crimean Army, 
she was impotent to help the army of women pushing into 
the arena at home. Besides, war had not for centuries 
really come home to the British breast. In the great Na- 
poleonic days, when Jane Austen was writing her quiet 
country-house comedies with never a word of the events 
that were shaking mankind, war was for England a foreign 
adventure, restricted mainly to two social classes, the cream 
of the cream and the dregs of the gutter. 

Your military acquaintance — your gay ensigns and crusty 



324 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

colonels — went off to the wars much as an expedition now 
goes off to the Antarctic. 

If you were a Society lady or a Becky Sharp you could 
follow Wellington to Flanders and dance in the great 
Brussels ball that Waterloo broke up. At the first booming 
of the cannon you fled, or stayed to pray for the fighters. 
It was all very interesting and picturesque, but except on 
the black days, eloquently described in Vanity Fair, when 
casualty lists were coming in, it did not actually touch the 
rooted population. If this was so with the average male 
civilian, how much more with the female! But now it 
appears that the civilian cannot be left out of the business, 
and that the female may be as destructive as the male. 
Women — even ladies of quality — can actually make shells, 
nay, according to Mr. Asquith who saw thousands of whilom 
dressmakers, milliners and parlor-maids at their fell work, 
they can make them "perhaps a little better" than men — 
an opinion expressed with still more enthusiasm by that 
Special Correspondent of the Times who saw "a girl doing 
a particular operation on a lathe which had been previously 
worked by a skilled man." She was doing, he records, 150 
per shift to the man's 30! * And this revelation led our Arch 

1 "The women who have taken the place of men in various trades are doing 
amazingly good work. It is estimated that the number of women substi- 
tuted for men in the metal trade is 77,000, in the leather trades 14,000, and 
in miscellaneous trades 274,000. Besides these many are in Government 
employment, an increasingly large body are in commercial houses, and a 
great number are employed in the dilution of labor and on agricultural 
work. . . . And they are doing many other kinds of work requiring the 
employment of machinery and calling for great skill." (Mr. Runciman, 
President of the Board of Trade, interview with Associated Press, New 
York, March 20, 19 16.) 

The Ministry of Munitions has published a lavishly illustrated volume, 
showing the women munitioneers in their many new r61es as engineers, shell 
makers, forewomen, etc., with a preface by Mr. Lloyd George, who says in 
brief "The women are splendid." 

" The General Manager of the Midland Railway, after a series of exacting 



THE WAR AND THE WOMEN 325 

Anti-Suffragist, Mr. Asquith, to the surmise that possibly 
women could do many other unexpected things. A Daniel 
come to judgment, indeed! It is true there were — long be- 
fore the war — seven million women, "gainfully occupied," 
but the State had never yet observed them, nor ever con- 
sidered their employment or unemployment a factor in 
social phenomena. To-day every eye is upon Venus rising — 
as in Botticelli's picture — on her shell. The State includes 
women in the National Register. The Times devotes to 
their services a chapter of its History of the War. The War 
Office publishes the names of dead nurses in the casualty 
lists. 

And not only does woman feed the fighting line directly 
as munition maker, horse trainer and general provider, and 
tend it as nurse, doctor and ambulance bearer, it has been 
discovered that in every direction she can relieve man and 
release him for the front. In the antediluvian age before 
the war, any feminine encroachment upon the male pre- 
serve would have been met — as the workmen in the Brieux 
play, La Femme Seule, met their women competitors — 
with the male fist. And if the new function involved 
changes of vesture or appearance, then the small boy, whom. 
I have elsewhere saluted as "the scavenger of manners," 
would have made life unbearable for the innovatress until 
she had worn him out by multiplication. But to-day? 
Why, the mere pictures in The Times' History of the War 
reveal women (in appropriate costumes) as police patrols, 
telegraph messengers, postwomen, ploughwomen, sheep 
shearers, page-girls, motorists, van drivers, commission- 
working tests, has confessed that the efficiency of women has been a revela- 
tion to him. . . . 

" In one case two women, each working only three hours overtime per week, 
are doing a certain job, necessary to keep a shop supplied with material, 
which it formerly took four men, working in night and day shifts, to accom- 
plish." (World's Work, March, 1916.) 



326 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

aires, railway booking clerks, ticket and luggage porters, 
omnibus and tram conductresses, bill-posters, butchers and 
bargees! One hears, too, of female grooms, lamplighters, 
vets., cattle-droves, scavengers (in new overalls), commercial 
travellers, and chartered accountants. There is even — O 
tempora, O mores — a games-mistress in a boys' school ! The 
very Government offices — immemorial abodes of the 
barnacle — have women clerks and lift attendants. What 
wonder if there move through our streets without raga- 
muffin rebuke the khaki-clad warriors of the Women's Vol- 
unteer Reserve! Some Scotch substitutes for men have 
even donned the breeks. 

But in addition to the many ways in which woman is 
actually seen stoking the furnaces of war, there is a growing 
recognition that even the woman at home is playing her 
part in the war. That men must fight and women must 
weep was long the stock argument of the anti-suffragists — 
for who would give a vote to tears? In vain we suffragists 
tried to make them understand that the fighting part of a 
nation was only the white-crested wave that throws itself 
furiously on the shore — behind it was the whole ocean of 
national energy. In vain we pointed out that a nation was, 
after all, only a collection of homes, and that it was from 
these homes that all the national strength issued, were it 
but in the shape of "man that is born of woman" or re- 
sources born of both. 

To-day press megaphones and flamboyant posters have 
proclaimed this truth to the dullest. Every hoarding has 
shown us the munition maker hand in hand with the soldier; 
warriors both. The War Loan carried on the tale. "Do 
you want to save our sailors' and soldiers' lives?" women, 
no less than men, were asked in great Governmental adver- 
tisements. "Do you want to bring the war to an end?" 
"You can make your money fight for you." "If you can- 



THE WAR AND THE WOMEN 327 

not use the sword for your country, you can use your pen 
by filling up this form." One of the latest and most decora- 
tive of these posters, though bristling with cannon and 
bayonets, is headed simply, "Appeal to Women." The 
silver bullet, in short, can be sped by a woman's hand, and 
the sinews of war are sexless. 1 

With half a million German women making war-material 
from the very outbreak of war, with the domesticated Frau 
producing forty per cent of the explosives and fifty per cent 
of the equipment, not to mention her replacing railway, 
tramway and motor men, with, in fact, over two million of 
her torn from the kitchen into industrial life, it could hardly 
escape attention even in Germany that the three K's had 
been transcended, and that the great male K (Krieg or 
Khaki) was not so outside the female province as that 
arrant K, the Kaiser, had imagined. 2 

1 My wise Englishwoman, in sending me an appeal she had received from 
the Treasury, headed "Self-Interest and Patriotism" writes: "The German 
Government has no monopoly of vulgarity. Could you not make some 
protest? I love a battle cry, 'St. George for merry England,' 'God and the 
right,' even the shout of the Dundee contingent in their charge 'Marmalade 
for ever' warms my heart, for I know what they meant; but what is the 
meaning of ' Self-interest and patriotism ' — it is worse than ' God and Mam- 
mon!' for it is really 'Mammon and God,' which is even inferior in its hit. 

"What has struck me most painfully since the beginning of the war has 
been the lack of imagination in the rich, who rule the modern world. Instead 
of inspiring the rest of us with noble example, they repress us both by precept 
(and such a precept) and example. What even is the good of their boasted 
sacrifice of their sons, when they will not sacrifice their dividends? English- 
men need no example of courage from their social superiors; the miners and 
the stokers and the countless unknown heroes, who have been always about 
us in our everyday fives are brave by nature, but our generous race is still 
childish in its attitude towards wealth, though the mass of us are not so vul- 
gar as ' the Treasury.' May not the working class refusal to take up the war 
loan be a spiritual perception of the dangers of investments? " 

2 "Before the war the German women, with all their incontestable ex- 
cellence, always appeared to me somewhat ridiculous in the way they 
'looked up' to every member of the stronger sex, even the most insignificant. 
Now they have an air of fearlessness and of conscious self-control. They give 



328 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

As the Frankfurter Zeitung confessed with characteristic 
German thoroughness, "Many of us have in these months 
felt it to be a defect that in Germany the State, with its 
system of universal service, embraces only the men, and 
then only in so far as they are capable of bearing arms. This 
system was decided upon at a time when wars were con- 
ducted with weapons only, and it no longer fits the present 
state of things, in which everything, gold and food, indus- 
trial products and science, is a means of carrying on war, 
and in which the war itself consists to a great extent of 
scientific and economic labor." 

War consists to a great extent of scientific and economic 
labor! So at last man has discovered mid-day at twelve 
o'clock! "Every pit is a trench, every workshop a ram- 
part," cries Lloyd George, vividly lamenting the legions of 
miners and munition-makers a short-sighted policy had 
lured to Flanders. Armageddon may even, it appears, 
finally hinge on the manufacture of machine-tools. With 
war thus got beyond the tomahawk stage, the poor squaw 
can now as little be excluded from the tug of it as she ever 
was from the misery and murderousness of it. Indeed, 
according to the Times correspondent, "the full utilization 
of the resources already in sight depends on female labor." 
Battles are won in the factory as well as the field, and in the 
cornfield no less than the field of war. They were always 
won in the kitchen and the nursery. 1 

an impression of having realized what they now have to perform, of their new 
position in a community where in so many directions they are taking the 
place of men." — (A Swedish Correspondent, Times, March 22, 1916.) 

The digging of earth for the " Underground " beneath the Friedrich- 
strasse in Berlin was entirely transferred to women who worked day and 
night. 

1 It is a thousand pities that the national housekeeping was not done by 
one of the sex that has always had to squeeze and manage. We should have 
escaped the enormous waste of the war, the mines of buried bully-beef, etc. 
When a woman cook was tried on Salisbury Plain, she saved thousands of 



THE WAR AND THE WOMEN 329 

But it is characteristic of the titanic, humorless Teuton 
that, having at last discovered the importance of the other 
sex, he proceeds to glorify, not woman, but the German 
woman — notoriously the least attractive type in Europe. 
This creature is, according to the Berlin Post, to rear a race 
of demi-gods and take "her predestined place on the throne 
as queen over all her sisters, the adored from afar by the 
men of all classes, the mate of the Germans only." 

The game of "Cherchez la Femme" has so long distorted 
the French vision that France cannot even now find her as 
quickly as Germany has done. For Germany had only to 
open its eyes to see : whereas the long practice of the leer had 
given France a permanent squint. 

In the German railways, tramways and shops a system- 
atic substitution of women for men began simultaneously 
with the mobilization of the army, in France the substituted 
reserve was, as far as possible, drawn from males too old 
or too young for war; and, although women did largely 
replace men, it was mainly as a family affair. Mothers, 
sisters, daughters, wives, stepped into the breach less as 
women than as relatives. This was natural enough on the 
land where the women have absolutely replaced the men, 
even to the hardest ploughing. But the same system has 
prevailed outside the home. The Paris "Underground" 
set the example — which was largely followed — of inviting 
the women of the family to occupy the places of their 
menkind and keep them warm till their return. Even 
when, alas! they are not to return the principle is recognized. 
The Government has chosen the relatives of fallen soldiers to 
work In the base establishments of the French Army. And 
in philanthropy, no less than in industry, woman has not 
asserted herself as an independent sex, with separate or- 

pounds, not to mention the better and more varied dietary. Army cooks 
are now fast becoming female. 



330 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

ganizations. Thus in France woman is still not "on her 
own." Nevertheless, since many of the males, alas! will 
never come back to their posts, some of this new labor 
must inevitably escape dislodgment at the end of the war. 
Not by thus evading the labor problem of women can 
France circumvent it. 

In the higher circles of French femininity there is even 
less change. The Germans may capture French provinces, 
they cannot shake the fortress of French convention. War- 
charity among the grandes dames, if on a magnified scale, 
moves in the old social grooves and cliques, and is run with 
the same fashionable Catholic machinery. Nor has the 
jeune fille bien elevee been free to choose her own "good 
work, " though, like a lay nun, she has been given plenty. 
But the mondaine has not abandoned her frivolity, nor has 
the war — after the first panic and in despite of the billowing 
crape in the streets — succeeded in spoiling the appearance 
of the Parisienne. Paris still rules the fashions as Britannia 
the waves. 

Italy falls even below France in the handling of 
the woman question. At the outset of the war woman- 
conductors were hooted off the trams. Decidedly the 
Latin races have a larger ohmage than the Saxon. 

II. Woman as Fighter 

"Babe Christabel was royally born." — Gerald Massey. 

And all this new activity and all this reinterpretation 
and recognition of old activity takes place in the fierce 
light that beats upon a boom. Had not the female suffrage 
question been set in violent motion by the Pankhursts, 
it is possible that the object lessons of the war would not 
have been reaped for the benefit of the cause. Even a 
partisan of the feminine vote like Mr. Lloyd George must 



THE WAR AND THE WOMEN 33 1 

find fresh food for sympathy as he rides in his motor-car 
under the skilled steerswomanship of his chauffeuse, Miss 
Caroline Marsh, the celebrated hunger-striker. And noth- 
ing has more contributed to the sinking in of these morals 
than the wise and patriotic action of the Pankhursts in 
suspending their militancy, whose relative innocuousness 
was, moreover, suddenly revealed by the bonfires of the 
man-made hell. The Suffragette, still doggedly declaring 
that there was no way of winning the vote save by fighting, 
and that in the impossibility of fighting, it was useless going 
on, suspended publication. The other suffrage parties 
which had not placed their trust in their fighting power, 
found no such difficulty in continuing their organs, even 
though their activities were mainly transferred to relief 
work and military service of every kind, for which their 
existing organization of women provided a ready-made 
machinery. The National League for Opposing Woman 
Suffrage pursued similarly the path of beneficence, so that 
the suffrage movement may be congratulated on having 
called into existence this valuable federation of female 
activities. The anti-suffragist women had always occupied 
a Gilbertian platform in emphasizing from it that woman's 
place was the home, and the paradox was not diminished 
by the attempt to eke out its negations by a demand for 
the municipal franchise. For it is obvious that the female 
anti-suffragist, like Aristotle's sceptic, cannot stir a finger 
without self-contradiction. The crowning irony was her 
enlistment in the khaki-clad ranks of the Volunteer Train- 
ing Corps and the National Reserve. No wonder she made 
a point of "eschewing advertisement" and with "patriotic 
abnegation" silently absorbing herself in other female 
bodies. A militant anti-suffragist might have touched 
even Mrs. Humphry Ward's sense of humor. 

There was once a social state composed of families, each 



332 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

unit circling round and represented by the male bread- 
winner. He went out into the hurly-burly; the woman 
remained the delicate flower of the home. It was a concep- 
tion not without its beauty. For this it is now sought to 
substitute families with a dual center, and equal rights 
in the hurly-burly for both sexes. It is a conception not 
without its ugliness. But the striving for it is not a mere 
play of the brain. The female flowers have been already 
flung out of the home; millions of Englishwomen even 
before the war had been driven into factories, shops and 
offices. 1 The anti-suffragists did not attempt to drive 
back this labor into the security and sanctity of the home, 
and the attempt to secure for it the same political status 
as male labor they combated. Placed between two worlds, 
they made the worst of both. 

Their arch-antagonist, Miss Christabel Pankhurst, as 
soon as war broke out, abandoned her place of exile in 
France to tour in the States as a champion of England, and 
rendered valuable service in that hot-bed of pro-Germanism 
by her oratorical and dialectical powers; her repartee, 
sharpened by years of practice against the Briton, galling 
now the German-American. Possibly there was in this 
campaign of hers some of the remorse and zeal of the con- 
vert. Possibly she felt she owed reparation to England 
for being one of the factors that had inclined the Kaiser to 
war by causing him to miscalculate the internal schisms 
of England. At any rate the tyranny and truculence of 
which she had for years accused the British Government 
became now the peculiar property of Prussia, while England 
loomed as Liberty's one homestead and safeguard. On 

1 According to an investigation by the Fabian Women's Group, reported 
on by Ellen Smith, slightly over 5 1 per cent of these women workers main- 
tain nearly thrice their own number of other persons (more than seven to 
every four), thus playing the part of the breadwinner popularly limited to 
the male. 



THE WAR AND THE WOMEN 333 

her return from this penitential pilgrimage she abounded 
even more in this sense. The Suffragette was revived. 
But the re-born offspring was no longer the legitimate 
organ of the movement. It should rather have been called 
the ''War Baby," so unmistakably was it a child of military 
passion. (It is significant that the care of the war babies 
is precisely the task selected by the Pankhursts from all 
the philanthropic possibilities.) Not one of the Press 
demagogues who daily or weekly whip up the beast in man, 
not one of the militarists who are out to crush militarism, 
could vie with Christabel Pankhurst in her impassioned 
torrents of Jingoese. The worst extravagances of our 
Junker journalists were outdone. I know no male fire- 
eater who has set forth so drastic a programme as this 
"female of the species." 

"Institute compulsory national service, military and 
industrial. Tighten the blockade so that Germany shall 
not receive a single thing helpful to them in the prosecu- 
tion of the war. Purify the official organization of the 
country of naturalized Germans and of Germans born in 
England but of German blood. Purify it, too, of any of 
British blood who may be pro-German or half-hearted in 
the prosecution of the war." Even "true-born English- 
men," you see, less bellicose than the majority, are to be 
kicked out of England! And it is only the other day that 
the papers were discussing what island could serve as the 
St. Helena of the suffragettes. 

Of course, this root-and-branch rodomontade is only 
another illustration of her head-long extremism, of her 
crude conception of statesmanship as militancy, and of 
tactics as invariably frontal and furious. The climax of this 
raging, tearing campaign was reached when among the men 
"half-hearted in the prosecution of the war" were suddenly 
included Mr. Asquith and Sir Edward Grey. A "Great 



334 THE WAR F0R THE WORLD 

Patriotic Meeting," called at the Albert Hall, was revealed 
at the eleventh hour as designed to hurl them from power — 
a revelation which explained why the Times had been 
daily devoting to the mere preliminary booming of the 
meeting ten times the space it had accorded to the most 
important and sensational suffrage gatherings at this same 
hall. The manoeuvre was circumvented through the im- 
mediate refusal of the hall by its proprietors. 1 

Infinitely more popular have been the furious rushes 
directed by the Pankhursts against the Union of Democratic 
Control, a body constituted of the very men who first 
risked their reputation on behalf of her derided movement. 
Not that they had not already been castigated the moment 
they had disagreed with her tactics. But she might have 
remembered that the Union was the first political body 
to announce that by "Democratic Control" it meant a 
joint government of men and women, and that its object 
was to sweep away the secret diplomacy and veiled autoc- 
racy that nullify the male vote, and will make the female 
vote, when it is obtained, equally ineffective in the vast 
issues of peace and war. These issues mould our lives far 
more than the questions we are permitted to vote upon, 
and to bring them equally under the sphere of the vote 
must be the desire of every suffragist. But then there 
never was a person more essentially anti-suffragist than 
Christabel Pankhurst. Nobody has ever been allowed a 
vote in the affairs of her union. She is simply a dictator, 
born out of her due sex and time. It happened that the 
state of society afforded no scope for her natural driving 
power, and so she was reduced to the leadership of women. 
But her constant obsession with the image of Joan of Arc 

1 Lord Willoughby de Broke was to have been the chief speaker. A circu- 
lar, now before me, signed by Mrs. Pankhurst, says " the Prime Minister and 
Sir Edward Grey are unfit for their positions." 



THE WAR AND THE WOMEN 335 

shows — as the psycho-analyst would say — that all along 
she has sub-consciously hankered to lead men. For Joan 
of Arc did not win the battles of France with an army of 
Amazons. Now, spurring and cheering on the army of 
men, bidding them roll their enemies in the dust, Miss 
Pankhurst is at last in her true element. And the word 
"Purge, purge," which she ingeminates, recalls her other 
ambition to be Cromwell — the Cromwell of "Pride's Purge" 
and "Take away that bauble." She actually calls for a 
Cromwell to purge a certain London club of its "pro- 
Germans." And her following has changed with her pro- 
gramme. Of the Women's Social and Political Union, 
practically only the name remains, and of the Suffragette 
not even the name, for it has recently become Britannia 
who has only in common with the Suffragette that she is 
a female. Even Britannia now stands suppressed for 
super-patriotic scandal-mongering. No wonder the protes- 
tants of the union call for balance and balance-sheets, in 
the fear that the Pankhursts are giving up to England what 
was meant for the suffragist war-chest. 1 

But with the larger public, of course — apart from the 
Albert Hall mistake, and even that had its votaries and 
coteries — the new Pankhurst programme is immensely 
popular. Philistine M. P.'s have supported their meetings, 
bishops blessed their propaganda, noble lords prosed on 
their platform, genteel ladies walked in their processions — 
processions actually paid for by the Minister of Munitions, 

1 A manifesto adopted at a meeting on November 29, 1915, complains that 
the W. S. P. U. was virtually disbanded and there had been no balance- 
sheet since Spring, 191^. "My mother and I intend to remain," was Miss 
Pankhurst's reply. "By the constitution we cannot resign." The protest- 
ants now publish a monthly paper of their own called The Suffragette 
News Sheet. Miss Sylvia Pankhurst, who has entirely broken away from 
her mother and sister, has a formula of her own, "Human Suffrage," and a 
paper of her own called The Woman's Dreadnought, a bold pacifist labor and 
anti-imperialistic organ, the exact antithesis of Britannia. 



336 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

their whilom bete noire, Mr. Lloyd George — to demand 
the free and equal right to make explosives, and the papers 
have photographed and puffed them. Reported at last 
and at length by the great organs that had boycotted her, 
acclaimed by the great mobs that had clamored to duck 
her, Christabel Pankhurst, in the new-born Suffragette, 
cried in capital letters with a lack of humor that touched 
the sublime: 

"Trust the People and Defy the Cranks" 

It is a tragic circle in human affairs that the ex-martyr 
becomes the parvenu persecutor. But this assimilation of 
the Pankhursts to the mob is an asset to their cause proper. 
The masses, taught thus to find in woman so potent a 
reinforcement of their prejudices, will come to recognize 
how stupid was the anti-suffrage policy which deprived them 
of so valuable an ally. It was always the fatal mistake of 
Miss Pankhurst to overlook that woman's suffrage was 
essentially a man's question, that in man's hands lay the 
ultimate power of granting or withholding it, and that only 
by pleasing men could women — in the last analysis — 
achieve their emancipation. Now that by a happy accident 
the Pankhursts' platform coincides with that of the man in 
the street, now that the Pankhursts are able to "feed the 
brute" with his own gross diet, they stand far nearer his 
heart and their goal. Not to fight man but to second and 
sponge him in his own fight is the road to female suffrage. 
The palm denied to the Christian martyr will be won by the 
recruiting sergeant. 

The tragedy of this degeneration lies not in the character 
of Christabel Pankhurst — which is unchanged and un- 
changeable — but in the character of Mrs. Pankhurst, pos- 
sessed by the daimon of her daughter. It is impossible to 



THE WAR AND THE WOMEN 337 

read the earlier speeches of Mrs. Pankhurst without seeing 
that in her the age had produced one of those rare spirits 
who come to interpret and incarnate the great saying of 
St. Paul to the Corinthians: "Hopeth all things, suffereth 
all things, believeth all things." The first Mrs. Pankhurst 
knew that the Kingdom of Heaven suffereth no violence 
and is not taken by assault, and her victory, had it come 
then, would have been a victory for "female" suffrage, for 
the contribution of gentleness and social reform which 
woman has to bring to politics. Her victory, when it comes 
now, will be only a victory for a swashbuckling suffrage, 
apparelled at all points like a man. 

III. Woman as Peacemaker 

" Joyez la paix vivante au milieu de la guerre, — 1' Antigone eternelle 
qui se refuse a la haine et qui, lorsqu'ils souffrent, ne sait plus dis- 
tinguer entre ses freres ennemis." — Romain Rolland. 

Happily, other women have appeared, not so content as 
the Pankhursts "to play the sedulous ape" to man, or to be 
dominated by his outlook. The women who met at The 
Hague in an international congress that embraced both 
English women and German women, had anticipated Ro- 
main Rolland's appeal to women to cease to be "men's 
shadows." "The women who do not fight have no right to 
goad on the fight," said the distinguished French women 
who addressed a greeting to the congress. And they laid 
down "the fundamental principle of feminism" as "the 
wish to create, while destroying war, a better and juster 
humanity." Just because they had no political voice in 
any of the belligerent countries, it was for them now to say 
what the men who were fighting could not say, and to pre- 
serve the spirit of international fraternity. And so this 
congress of women, from a dozen nations, under the pres- 



338 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

idency of Jane Addams, protested unanimously against 
"the madness and horror of war," believing with Queen 
Elinor in King John: 

" This might have been prevented and made whole 
By very easy arguments of love, 
Which now the manage of two kingdoms must 
With fearful bloody issue arbitrate." 

The congress protested, too, against the assumption that 
women were protected in the war, and adjured "the Gov- 
ernments of the world" to put an end to it. Nor was their 
protest to be platonic. Under the inspiration of the prac- 
tical and elaborately worked out project by Miss Julia 
Wales, of Wisconsin University, entitled "Continuous 
Mediation without Armistice," it was resolved to try to 
create a conference of neutral nations for this purpose, also 
"to invite suggestions for settlement from each of the 
belligerent nations," and in any case to submit simul- 
taneously to all of them "reasonable proposals as a basis of 
peace." Women would, in fact, try to mediate between 
their males, as one tries to disentangle dogs. Nay, more, 
the women have actually gone out from this congress — 
like Queen's Messengers — and have been received by kings, 
premiers and presidents. The scheme of "continuous 
mediation" has been adopted likewise by the Quakers, 
and is said to be regarded by some Governments as "the 
sanest plan yet suggested." For climax, the congress re- 
solved that an international meeting of women shall be held 
in the same town and at the same time as the Congress of 
Powers that is to frame the terms of the peace settlement 
after the war, for the purpose of presenting practical pro- 
posals to this conference. Women will be "men's shadows," 
but in what a novel sense! Side by side with the portentous 
and pontifical male congress which has always hitherto done 



THE WAR AND THE WOMEN 339 

the carving of the nations, and never failed to make a hash 
of it, will sit — like sober peahens beside their peacocks — 
a body of women interpreting national dignity and sov- 
ereignty and all the grandiose vocabulary of the male in 
terms of human life. 

"We women judge war differently from men," said 
Dr. Aletta Jacobs, the Dutch initiatress of the Peace Con- 
gress. "Men consider in the first place the economic re- 
sults, the extension of power and so forth. But what is 
material loss to us women in comparison to the number of 
fathers, husbands, brothers and sons who march out to war 
never to return? We women consider above all the damage 
to the race resulting from war and the grief and the pain 
and the misery it entails." That woman should thus revise 
what Thackeray called "the devil's code of honor" is not 
surprising, for she has actually borne in pain and reared in 
sick anxiety the body it is proposed to mutilate. "Unruly " 
as Shakespeare's Duchess of York, she cries to her lord: 

" Hadst thou groaned for him 
As I have done, thou'dst be more pitiful." 

I do not forget the Spartan mother who bade her son 
return with his shield or on it. But that mother had had 
no chance of developing an outlook of her own. Sparta was 
not so much a State as a barrack; every mother's son, unless 
he had been killed off as too sickly for a soldier, was taken 
from her at the age of seven to be stupefied by drill. She 
could only please her master by exaggerated echoes of his 
"Laconic" wisdom. To-day even in the Sparta of Prussia 
Clara Zetkin and other women have courted martyrdom by 
their protests against the war. And the wisdom of even the 
male peacemaker is no longer to go unquestioned, for, as we 
have seen, woman has resolved to shadow the Peace Congress 
and send it suggestions. There is a certain high comedy in 



34-0 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

the situation because everything will probably have been 
cut-and-dried beforehand by secret treaty, as it was at the 
Congress of Berlin. But what a stride forward in the posi- 
tion of woman since 1878 when Beaconsfield and Bismarck 
remodelled Europe with results that are before us! It is 
she who aspires to save civilization in the collapse of the 
politicians, and religion in the break-down of the bishops. 
Not every pious lady has been making shells on Sunday, and 
Christianity never had a nobler and more eloquent apostle 
than Miss Maude Royden, touring heathen Britain in a 
van, or Miss Cavell, laying down her life with the immortal 
sentence, "Patriotism is not enough." The "imperishable 
story of her latest hours," declared the Premier to the Com- 
mons, "has taught the bravest of us the supreme lesson of 
courage." "Yes, sir," he added emphatically, "and in the 
United Kingdom and throughout the Dominions of the 
Crown there are thousands of such women, and a year ago 
we did not know it." What a confession ! For seven years 
thousands of women had been martyrizing themselves for 
the cause of female freedom, and the Prime Minister and 
Parliament did not know such women existed ! * No wonder 

1 On this point my wise Englishwoman writes: "I thoroughly sympathize 
with your stupefaction over Mr. Asquith's ignorance of his fellow-country- 
women. The beautiful thing about Edith Cavell is that she is typical of 
what is finest in us — like Correggio before the masterpieces of Rome, one 
may say, ' I too, am a woman' — -and I have known char-women and washer- 
women, who have made one inclined to say the same. But I beat you as well 
as Mr. Asquith in one bit of knowledge — it needed no suffragetting to teach 
me a woman's capacity for martyrdom. And now with the cussedness of my 
kind, I frankly declare 'I don't like Martyrs' and I should not give Edith 
Cavell that doubtful title— a brave Englishwoman, who like More's Utopi- 
ans, went to meet death cheerfully. 

"The most interesting point that I have noticed in this war is a diminished 
fear of death amongst us. This has nothing to do with the war, which re- 
veals but did not create that attitude of mind, — it seems to me largely due 
to the diminished fear of hell, which had so long obsessed mankind. In the 
Boer war I noticed most that when we had reverses in South Africa, re- 



THE WAR AND THE WOMEN 34 1 

the seventh centenary of Magna Charta — entirely ignored 
by Englishmen — was celebrated this year only by the 
Women's Freedom League. 1 

Thus there is solid ground for confidence that the en- 
franchisement of women will not end in the addition of 
ten million pseudo-males to the electorate. What Mr. 
Roosevelt — in his gentle voice — calls the shrieking sister- 
hood, will not merely echo the bawling brotherhood. Much 
more likely is it that the pseudo-chivalry of the male, with 
all its glittering mediaeval lumber, will be swept away by 
female common sense as remorselessly as his military 
plumes and laces have been shorn away by the shears of 
necessity. Woman will play the Sancho Panza to the 
demented Don Quixote, with his babble of "battles, en- 
chantments, adventures, extravagances, combats and chal- 
lenges," and where he saw two mighty armies with pomp 
and pageantry of "arms, colors, devices and mottoes," 
she will see only the two flocks of sheep that were really 
there, obscured by the cloud of dust: the dumb herds driven 
to slaughter and lost in the dust thrown into the world's 
eyes by politicians and poets. She will see Rozinante, not 
as the war-horse clothed in thunder, but as the lean starve- 
ling hack of reality, and Dulcinea, in whose honor the 
battle is joined, as the frowsy hoyden she is. There are 
indeed a few men who can see through the dust almost as 
clearly, as women. "Only the other day," complains the 
Times of July 17th, "a member of Parliament was talking 
about the money that would be wanted for housing after 
the war, and, evidence is always cropping up to show that 
social reform still fills the minds of politicians and officials 

cruiting was stimulated instead of discouraged. Then I knew that, even 
among the well-to-do, our old courage remained intact." 

1 With so many young male idealists killed off, the role of women as torch 
bearers of civilization will become increasingly important. 



34 2 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

as the real business before them. The war is only an epi- 
sode in their lives." Degenerate Britons! How — as Roose- 
velt witheringly puts it — shall milk-and water match 
blood-and-iron? Unfortunately, Miss Margaret Scott tells 
us that without a quart of milk a day a sturdy soldier can- 
not be reared; and it would even seem as if "social reform" 
is as necessary to safeguard the population as trenches 
and field-guns. 

One of the few genuine "war-profits" has been the at- 
tention drawn to the cradle as the real "cradle of liberty." 
A meeting at the Guildhall, presided over by the Lord 
Mayor, for the reduction of the wastage of child-life, took 
on for the first time the true guise of a "great patriotic 
meeting." The war, though war- wages and allowances 
have nourished the mothers as never before, has also taken 
many from the nursery or exposed them — in the first 
rapture of handling money without even the necessity of 
feeding their lords — to the temptation of drink: they have 
taken man's place in the tap-room, as everywhere else. 
Hence even politicians have begun to see the need of look- 
ing after our first future line of defence — our infantry. 

Historians tell us that the Crusades, designed to win the 
tomb of Christ, promoted commercial intercourse between 
East and West. Germany, setting out to assert the male 
ideal, has given an immense jog to the feminine. But the 
price would have staggered the optimism of Pangloss. 
Ho-ti, whose house must be burnt down before he could 
taste crackling, roasted his pig infinitely cheaper. The 
loss of legions of young men (some of them even by mar- 
riage to French or Flanders lasses) will increase the number 
of spinsters, who will clamor with increasing outspokenness 
for a revised sex ethic. 1 The entry of women into so many 

1 Males have already begun to clamor from another point of view. "The 
time is coming and coming fast, when the birth of children will be a matter of 



THE WAR AND THE WOMEN 343 

occupations will produce female blacklegs and gravely 
agitate the trade unions, already torn between the alterna- 
tive of admitting women, with "equal pay for equal work," 
or seeing themselves undercut by cheaper but not always 
less efficient — and sometimes even more efficient — female 
labor. 1 

The servant problem will be aggravated; the girls who 
have tasted the higher wages and urban freedom of the 
munition factories will not lightly return to domestic ser- 
vice, especially in the country house. 

There will be friction all along the line at those points 
which women have not yet stormed — and these embrace 
in England the whole of the legal profession, the higher 
walks of the Civil Service and even of medicine, not to 
mention Parliament and Government. The end of the 
war will bring not peace but sex strife added to the inevi- 
table economic discontents. For the social landscape can- 
not be transformed for women without changing man's 
situation too. When the valleys are exalted, the hills are 
apt to subside. By an odd coincidence the female chapter 
of the Times 1 History of the War winds up with a picture 
of "A Woman Making a Doll's House." That was, it 
appears, and not only from Ibsen, an exclusively male 
occupation. What sinister symbolism lurks in this climax? 
Is the man to be henceforward the pampered puppet? 

vital necessity to the nation. Let us therefore have no canting talk about 
'morality.'" John Bull. 

1 Owing to the attitude of the Dockers' Union all the women employed at 
the Liverpool Docks had to be sent away. 



WAKE UP, PARLIAMENT! 

(Speech to the United Suffragists at Kingsway Hall, February 25, 1915.) 

"We thought her dying when she slept, 
And sleeping when she died." — Hood. 

The Resolution that I have the privilege to move runs as 
follows : — 

"That this meeting is profoundly convinced that the basis 
of peace at the end of the present war, in common with all 
other international and domestic affairs, cannot be satisfac- 
torily settled while women are excluded from the rights of 
citizenship; and accordingly it demands that the Government 
take advantage of the present party truce to carry into law a 
non-party measure for women's enfranchisement." 

But I confess I feel somewhat embarrassed at having to 
raise the question of votes for women at this juncture. In- 
stead of condoling with women upon their lack of votes I 
feel more like congratulating them upon it. For upon us 
who have votes — be we English or German, French or 
Austrian — lies at least some part of the responsibility for 
the most terrible war in history, the gigantic misery and 
waste of which not even all the heroism and self-sacrifice 
it has called forth can redeem, nor all the splendors and 
profits of victory wipe out. It is with the consent and con- 
nivance of us men that millions of educated Europeans are 
at this moment burrowing underground, side by side with 
Asiatics and Africans, in some instances recent converts 
from cannibalism, 1 and that the era which prated of the 

1 A picture in the Observer of November 29, 1914, shows us our "Fijian 

344 



WAKE UP, PARLIAMENT!. 345 

Superman has produced the Super-Rabbit. 1 It is with our 
consent and connivance that colossal sums which might have 
renewed the whole social fabric of Europe are squandered 
at an appalling speed in shells and bombs which in their 
turn destroy yet more of the slowly-garnered products of 
labor. It is with our consent and connivance that the no- 
blest and strongest of our sex are being eliminated or muti- 
lated, and that instead of the survival, we have the funeral 
of the fittest. It is with our consent and connivance that 
half the human race is at war and the other half caught in 
the currents of ruin, while the wail of broken bodies goes 
up from three Continents. It is with our consent and con- 
nivance that a colossal world-industry has been set up, the 
object of which is to produce dead people, an industry, 
the capital sunk in which is so vast, and the plant of which 
is so extensive, embracing as it does aerial and submarine 
machinery as well as surface plant, that it costs some two 
hundred pounds to turn out a single corpse. 2 I do not say 
this output of carrion is quite useless: it serves to manure 
the fields of Europe and even to produce fruits more or less 
valuable in the spiritual and political spheres. Nor do I 
say that England could easily have avoided going into the 
business — or could at this moment cease manufacturing 
corpses, or allow them to be made exclusively by Germans 
established in Belgium and France. 3 All I desire to point 

Warriors," described as "formerly cannibals but now mostly Wesleyan 
Methodists!" 

1 Dr. Max Dressoir, Professor of Psychology at the University of Berlin, 
after a study of life in the trenches, reports that its characteristics are 
"animalistic." 

2 A French artillery officer has calculated it takes three tons of metal to 
kill a single soldier. But to this must be added the cost of the cannon and 
the upkeep and travelling expenses of the Killers. 

3 It is curious that humanity can bear to do what it cannot bear to say. 
This simple facing of the facts gave pain to a mother who wrote to the Pall 
Mall Gazette. Of course my words were deliberately chosen to convey to 



346 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

out is that we have now before us the results of the male 
direction of the planet. It is open to argument whether 
women or women with men, would have done better: it is 
beyond question that they could not possibly have done 
worse. And since what cannot possibly be done worse 
stands a very large chance of being done better, common 
sense combines with every dictate of reason and justice 
to demand that in the business of running the State women 
should now have an equal hand. 

And though from one point of view their freedom from 
our blood-guilt is enviable, it is not fair either to them or to 
us that they should have no share in the responsibility for 
the Titanic tragedy which they are now asked to endure, 
alleviate and pay for. Granted even that woman's place is 
the home, the waves of war do not draw back at her door- 
step. Foreign Policy stands in no sharp separation from 
Domestic Economy. Politics is no strange monastic region 
remote from female interests. Bombs and shells do not 
avoid the home because it is woman's place. Precisely upon 
the home beat the questions of food-prices and coal-prices, 
child-labor and war-pensions. And all these questions, 
like the workings of military law upon her sex, find woman 
without even the protection of the vote. But to-day, even 
for the rabidest anti-suffragist, the home is not woman's 
exclusive place — she is indispensable in the firing zone, 
in the khaki factories, in the hospitals; and England, which 

others my horror of this international insanity so that they might end it as 
soon as honor permits, and base their future idea of honor on avoiding its 
repetition. At the cost of hurting this "Mother's" feelings I might save 
many other mothers their sons. I should not have thought it an unpleasant 
suggestion that the dead fructify the fields, indeed I was pleased to note from 
a War Correspondent's report that in one place this was actually happening. 
That the spirit may be having separate adventures is irrelevant. To suppose 
that this tragic butchery could be circumvented by immortality would be 
to deprive death of its reality, heroism of its substance and war-makers of 
their guilt. 



WAKE UP, PARLIAMENT! 347 

so bitterly opposed her entrance into the medical schools, 
is now thanking God that so many female doctors are avail- 
able and is crying for more. Not a few eminent men have 
gone out to America to champion the cause of the Allies and 
of British freedom. I know none who has done it more 
vigorously or effectively than Christabel Pankhurst, who 
said in New York: "You would not have thought much of 
us suffragettes, of our intelligence, our patriotism, our love 
of freedom, if we had let militarism, the Kaiser and all his 
tribe, use us in this task of breaking down the world's 
stronghold of liberty — use us to help destroy the mother 
of Parliaments. No. No. That shall never be." One 
would have thought that if only in graceful acknowledg- 
ment, the mother of Parliaments would now remember the 
daughters of England. Are they, who have so nobly and 
uncomplainingly taken their place in every department of 
the national life in order to help wage this war which was 
thrust upon them, to have no voice in the Peace-Settlement 
either? 

But even as I ask this question, I am conscious of a mock- 
ing sprite that answers it by another. "What voice are 
you men going to have in the Peace-Settlement?" I am 
here to cry "Votes for women." Ought I not rather to be 
crying "Votes for men?" For our vaunted male vote is 
powerless in foreign affairs — which, as we have just seen, are 
really domestic affairs by a roundabout route. We men are 
humored like little children with a nursery vote, but when 
it comes to adult business, to questions of life and death, 
to things that change life for generations, we are as helpless 
as babes or females. The Government conceals from us — 
even from some of its own colleagues x — the engagements 
that commit us to war. Our responsibility for this cosmic 

1 Burke speaks of the device of the "double Cabinet," and Bright com- 
plained that wars were decided by only two or three men. 



348 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

fury is not, therefore, so heavy as it seems : it is not an im- 
mediate responsibility, but it lies in our not having de- 
mocratized our Government in the past, and it will lie upon 
us in the future if we do not now set to work to make — in the 
language of Mr. Asquith — "the will of the people prevail." 

As you are perhaps aware a Union of Democratic Control 
has just been founded, on whose Council I have the honor 
to be, and since this Union is already spreading its roots far 
and wide in London and the provinces, Mr. Brailsford and 
myself thought it desirable it should define its position 
towards suffrage before it spread any further. For we 
know the strength and prevalence of the delusion that the 
will of the people is the will of half the people, that Democ- 
racy is a matter of trousers, and that the voice of the people 
is the voice of man. The Union was more than willing to 
put itself on record as free from this favorite fallacy, and at 
its second meeting the other day passed a resolution de- 
claring that "the Union of Democratic Control, convinced 
that democracy must be based on the equal citizenship of 
men and women, invites the co-operation of women." 
It further recognized the convergence of the two lines of 
work by the election of a prominent woman suffragist on 
the executive committee. 

It is true that of the four cardinal points of the Union's 
programme, the fourth, calling upon Great Britain to pro- 
pose an all-round reduction of armaments as part of the 
Peace-Settlement, has no special importance for women, 
except in their role of housekeepers, but as regards the first 
point of the Union's programme it is peculiarly necessary 
to guard against women being overlooked. For this article 
demands that no Province shall be transferred from one 
Government to another without the consent, by plebiscite 
or otherwise, of the population of such province. And the 
tendency to forget that the population includes women is 



WAKE UP, PARLIAMENT! 349 

more marked when men are making politics than when they 
are making love. The second point, aiming to remove 
Foreign Policy from the sphere of secret diplomacy to the 
control of Parliament, means an enrichment of the vote 
which will make women's struggle for it infinitely more 
worth while. And the remaining point which seeks to re- 
place the bankrupt policy of "The Balance of Power" 
by the establishment of an International Council, and 
thus foreshadows what Tennyson called "the Parliament 
of Man," is a warning to women to be on their guard as 
to the interpretation of this poetic phrase. 1 

But my embarrassment in proposing the resolution I 
have to move springs not only from the fact that even the 
male population has no voice in the Peace-Settlement. The 
resolution asks for Parliament to pass Women's Suffrage 
but there is practically no Parliament in which to pass it. 
The papers exultingly tell us that Germany is on short 
commons. But it is England which is on short commons. 
There are at Westminster no bells and no bills, no divisions 
and no debates, or none that are not talked out; there are 
numerous by-elections but no ballots. On such short com- 
mons are we that two hundred M. P.'s have gone to the 
front. All honor to them — but the front is no place for a 
Member of Parliament. The place of a Member of Parlia- 
ment is in Westminster — it is what we pay him for — and 
if he cannot be in Westminster he must resign. Or at least 
he must give place to a locum tenens, the constituency 
agreeing to keep his place open for him. As a result of 
this slackness of the People's House we have witnessed 
the amazing spectacle of the House of Lords meeting 
in its absence to pick up the fragments into which the 
Commons had torn Magna Charta. I always predicted that 

1 The U. D. C. has since added a fifth point, repudiating economic war 
after the conclusion of Peace. 



35° THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

Mr. Asquith would tame neither the Lords nor the Ladies, 
but such a topsy-turvy situation leaves the most ironic 
imagination gasping. It would not surprise me now to 
see the Lords forcing Female Suffrage upon a kicking 
Radical Cabinet. But whether forced by the Lords or 
forced by the Ladies, forced it must be. The notion that 
this is a dead season in politics, that two hundred members 
may go off to the war, and that those who do not serve 
their country in the trenches ought to neglect it on the 
benches, is a notion that cannot bear a moment's criticism. 
I quite agree, of course, that in a time of national danger 
all parties should stand together. But they should stand 
together only against the external danger, not against the 
internal progress of their own country. I admit, too, that 
on the heads of the Ministers He terrific burdens and terrific 
responsibilities, largely indeed due to their own failure to 
provide for the contingencies they secretly risked, but none 
the less terrific. But if the heads of departments may thus 
be excused from attending to anything but the war, all the 
more reason why the other six hundred should get busy 
about something else. An easy division of labor would 
leave the war to the Cabinet and social legislation to the 
Commons. To divert at such a moment a single foot- 
pound of energy from the struggle against Germany would 
be almost treason. But for those who cannot bring energy 
to bear upon the struggle, to be overwhelmed by the 
burden of other people's activities is not patriotism 
but paralysis. I wish the House would take example 
by my French nursery governess, who, cut off from her 
family in the danger area, and from her father in the 
trenches, and without in these latter days any news 
from either, calmly continues her routine of duty. There 
should now reign in the House of Commons not stag- 
nation but the very heyday of legislation. The idea 



wake up, parliament! 35 1 

that now we should eat, breathe, sleep nothing but war 
would be intelligible if instead of being a great nation we 
were a nomadic tribe of scalp-hunters, or even if the war 
were to be a mere brief interruption of our civilized routine, 
a spasm of intensity, an affair of three months. But ac- 
cording to Lord Kitchener it is to last three years — and 
even then there is no telling. We know that history has 
had its Seven Years' war, its Thirty Years' war, and even 
longer wars. Are we during this indefinable interval to 
cease to exist as a civilization? Our M. P.'s in the rabbit- 
warrens are at least nobly active: are our M. P.'s at home 
to become rabbits in hutches — lettuce eaters in a lettuce- 
land? * Surely this is no necessary consequence of the state 
of war. If we are to live in a state of war, we must adjust 
ourselves to this new condition as we adjusted ourselves 
to the dangerous bicycle, to the menacing motor-car, as 
we have adjusted ourselves to the dark streets. In still 
darker ages, war was a permanent condition of life. Yet 
the great international universities taught, the great 
cathedrals rose, the great tapestries were spun, and the 
great pictures painted. Even with us plays still run, pic- 
ture-plays still gallop, law-courts still sit, the Universities 
still teach despite the unbalanced patriotism of absentee 
tutors, galleries are still open, and novels still pour from 
the presses. "Business as usual," is the motto everywhere 
— even with our brave merchantmen; everywhere except 
in the House of Commons, where, as in a sacred hush, men 
shut their eyes and open their ears to receive the ukases 

1 See Our Parliamentary Loafers, by T. P. O'Connor, M. P., an article in 
the Daily Chronicle (March 7, 1916) in which he reports an M. P. as saying: 
"I have been chairman for many years of my county council; I am also the 
head of the education authority; I have given years of my life to the mastery 
of these local questions, and especially of the education question; all this 
experience and all my service are at the disposal of the House of Commons 
and of the Government; and yet I am doing nothing." 



35 2 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

of the Cabinet. In the language of the Times the House 
of Commons is now at last "business-like." To be business- 
like is to have no party-quarrels, but also to do no business, 
to close even before the other public houses. But let me 
tell the members that England expects the House to do its 
duty. Even the Stock Exchange could not be kept per- 
manently closed, nor can we afford to spike our legislative 
machine at the very moment when it could be most pro- 
ductive. 

Last year Mr. Galsworthy made a burning appeal for a 
number of legislative reforms which though favored by the 
vast majority of civilized beings, and tending to eliminate 
a vast volume of preventable suffering, could never be 
got through the House for lack of time. The House, busy 
with Welsh sects and Irish factions, had never a day off 
for the questions of sweating, and unhealthy housing and 
child-feeding; for the protection of song-birds or the rights 
of animals. Surely now, if ever, is the time to clear up all 
these arrears, to set the crooked straight, to redress the 
wrongs of the lower creatures and even of women. But 
I suppose to our panic-stricken Parliament the mere sug- 
gestion that it should perform the functions for which 
we pay it will seem heretical. And to the world at large 
our resolution that the House should now proceed to give 
votes to women will seem positively pro-German. On the 
contrary, it is not giving votes to women, that is pro-German. 
There is nothing more characteristically and pertinaciously 
Prussian. One would have thought that in view of our 
perpetual preachment against the German doctrine that 
Might is Right, we would jump at the opportunity to 
enfranchise the weaker sex, and to build the fabric of State, 
not on brute force but on reason and justice. Our war 
against the Germans, we say, is to prove that this principle 
of theirs is wrong. How much more logical to prove it to 



wake up, parliament! 353 

them by our example than by our artillery! And this is a 
war, we say, on behalf of oppressed nationalities and popula- 
tions, a war for human freedom. Are the rights of English- 
women less than the rights of semi-savage Bulgarians or 
Serbians? The exclusively Male State was always an un- 
natural monster, and if this is really a war to end Mili- 
tarism, as we hear on every hand, it must be a war to end 
the Male State. For what is Militarism but the expression 
of the Male State, the mark of the beast? It is to the Male 
State in excelsis, to Germany, that we owe all this incal- 
culable misery. I was looking the other day at an old 
English book published in 1633 called The Pleasure of 
Princes, or Good Men's Recreations. It wound up with a 
section on cock-fighting. In Prussia the pleasure of princes 
is man-fighting, and war is not only a good man's recrea- 
tion, it is the very soul of his goodness, without which he 
were a wicked waster and weakling. 

It has been urged that women are just as martial as men, 
that when Carlyle said the population of England was 
thirty millions, mostly fools, this concept of the State did 
for once not forget its female half, and that therefore the 
duplication of the vote would only duplicate the number of 
enfranchised fools. The answer is that it may duplicate 
the fools and fire-eaters but it will duplicate also the num- 
ber of brave and wise spirits with the status and prestige 
of voters. And in politics, despite the apparent counting 
of heads, it is the minority that tells in the long run, the 
minority that cares and labors and sacrifices. This inten- 
sive minority it is that stands to gain from Women's Suf- 
frage. The male fighters for justice and freedom will find 
their numbers doubled, and their courage quadrupled. 
Give women votes and you will soon find the concepts of 
the Male State undergoing considerable and salutary 
transformation. 



354 TH E WAR FOR THE WORLD 

In pressing for this reform during this very season, in 
demanding that the Government take advantage of the 
present party truce to call into law a non-party measure 
for women's enfranchisement, neither you nor I have the 
faintest intention or desire to worry or embarrass the 
Government. On the contrary, we would gladly excuse Mr. 
Asquith from attendance. Six hundred able-bodied men — 
or even four hundred — are quite competent to do the job 
without the assistance of a single Minister or bureaucrat. 
Has it not frequently been admitted that they are — the 
majority of our M. P.'s — in favor of Women's Suffrage, if 
only "militancy" would cease? Well "militancy" has 
ceased. It has been replaced by male militancy, militancy 
in the heavens above and in the earth beneath and in the 
waters under the earth, militancy of so appalling a sweep 
and character that even Lord Curzon and Mrs. Humphry 
Ward must look back with a sigh to the good old days of 
defaced golf greens and incinerated villas. And not only has 
female militancy ceased — it has been replaced as we have 
seen, by female service, service so devoted, so multifarious, 
so self-sacrificing and so heroic as to make any further 
denial of equal footing as futile as it would be ungrateful. 
Even that Arch-Priest of Anti-Suffrage, the Kaiser, break- 
ing through all precedent, has conferred the Iron Cross 
for bravery on some forty female nurses. Everywhere, 
you see, the distinction between the sexes is being reduced 
to its proper sphere — which is with few exceptions the 
sphere of privacy. Sex's place is the home. 

But I shall be told that Women's Suffrage is not suitable 
for the present truce, that it is a party-question. I do not 
admit, as I have said, that the truce should extend to party- 
legislation of an internal character. But in any case how 
can that be a party-question which each of the great parties 
has refused to put on its programme, which counts avowed 



WAKE UP, PARLIAMENT! 355 

sympathizers in both camps and which Mr. Asquith has 
repeatedly and generously admitted is handicapped in 
the House by not being a party-question? If its partisans 
now evade the issue on the plea it is a party-question, they 
will be confessing that their real concern is not for the 
cause but for what their party can get out of it. Gratitude 
has been defined as a lively sense of future favors. Is 
politics only a lively sense of future votes? Well, we shall 
see if the politicians will admit as much. 

The cause of Women's Suffrage, so far from being one 
that may or should be shelved at this moment, is one of 
peculiar importance at this moment. For it is a moment 
at which even the male vote has been reduced to impotence, 
at which Parliament is only a tied House. We stand under 
military law which sweeps away for very questionable rea- 
sons and in the throes of panic every constitutional safeguard 
built up by the wisdom and experience of generations of Eng- 
lishmen, including free speech, an uncensored press, and trial 
by jury. England has agreed not to end the war without the 
consent of either France or Russia and, wise or unwise, this 
world-shaking decision was made by a few gentlemen whose 
diplomacy is already under a cloud. We have also agreed 
to pool our resources with our Allies, and this new epoch- 
making arrangement was come to, not in the House of 
Commons, not in London at all, but round a table in Paris. 
And the new device of the "token vote, " the blank cheque 
given by Parliament for an unstated number of soldiers 
seems to remove both the army and the national purse 
from the control of the Commons. No wonder the Times 
exclaims that we are approaching the ideal Parliament, 
that Parliament in which "none are for a party and all are 
for the State." They are not for the State so much as for 
the Staff — that military junta which is always so soon 
ready to cry: "UEtat c'est moi." Even in peace-times, the 



356 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

military note dominates in our State-processions and 
parades of Empire. In vain among these prancing persons 
will you look for the leaders of civilization. How poor a 
figure cuts the poet beside the cavorting colonel— the 
colonel even censors the poet's plays. It is the perpetuation 
of this military symbolism and prestige that makes it so 
easy for a nation to slip back into its primeval savagery, 
and into its primeval serfdom, to cast off its parliamentary 
institutions and all the swaddling safeguards of civilization 
when the tom-tom calls to slaughter. There is nothing 
so near the skin as the war-paint. Victory or defeat may 
equally bring us this wave of militarism, of conscription, 
of further reduction of liberty, and the danger is the greater 
because we are under a Liberal Government, and thus 
deprived of an Opposition to criticize reactionary measures. 
Standing as we do under this sinister menace, it is pecu- 
liarly necessary at this moment that the concept of the 
Male State should not go unchallenged and that there 
should be a vivid and effective extension of the area of 
human liberty by the triumph of Female Suffrage. In 
pressing now for votes for women we are fighting equally 
to keep our votes as men. The cause of women has become 
the cause of freedom and civilization and it is for the sake 
of these great causes, even more than on behalf of women, 
that I ask you to pass this resolution. 



FOR SMALL MERCIES 

(Dedicated to "The Nation") 

Thinking of Poland and her tortured Jews, 
'Twixt Goth and Cossack hounded, crucified 
On either frontier, e'en the Pale denied, 
Wand'ring with bloodied staff and broken shoes, 
Scarred like their greatest son with stripe and bruise, 
Though thrice a hundred thousand fight beside 
Their Russian brethren and are glorified 
By death for those who flout them and abuse, 

I suddenly was touched to thankful tears. 

Not that one wave had ebbed of all this woe, 

Not that one heart had softened in "the spheres," * 

One touch of bureau-malice to fore-go, 

But that amid blind eyes, dumb mouths, deaf ears, 

One voice in England said these things were so. 

x Only permissible form of Russian reference to the Tsar and his Coun- 
sellors. 



357 



ROSY RUSSIA 

"The whole scenery was exactly disposed to captivate those good 
souls, whose credulous morality is so invaluable a treasure to crafty 
politicians." — Burke. 



Gradually the great land which gloomed like an Erebus 
on the political horizon has been glimmering as under the 
coming of dawn, and now it lies before us with the beautiful 
mystic rose-glow of snow-mountains, or some port of Arabia 
Felix at sunrise. Darkest Russia — the Russia of knouts 
and exiles, of pogroms and agents provocateurs, of cruel 
Cossacks driving chained gangs of poetic dreamers; the 
Russia of bankrupt finances, and bankrupt hopes — has 
disappeared as by a wave of the diplomatic wand. It was 
never more, we are told, than a literary nightmare, a Russia 
of the novelists, unreal as the fabular islands on the mediae- 
val map. Hardy Scotch explorers have penetrated on foot 
to the deepest fastnesses and remotest tundras of the Real 
Russia. They have scaled its frowning peaks and found 
them honeycombed with shrines. These processions march- 
ing footsore over the great white spaces — they are not 
convicts but pilgrims following the gleam. These moujiks 
rolling in the mud — they are not drunk, they never were 
drunk, even when vodka was the staff of life: they are 
mystics meditating the brotherhood of man and the father- 
hood of the Tsar. One sinister element, indeed, does exist 
in this sacrosanct realm, one subtle and serpentine race in 
this illiterate and ingenuous Paradise — that blasphemous 

358 



rosy Russia 359 

tribe which through nigh twenty centuries of whips and 
scorpions keeps proclaiming with dogged materialism that 
God is merely One. And even this viperous brood is 
warmed and suckled at the Christian breast it bites. And 
these careful scientific observations are corroborated by 
Russian statesmen, returning from financial week-ends in 
London, and by British novelists who after a whole fort- 
night in Russia have not come across a single pogrom. 

To one like myself brought up in the Jingo faith, all this 
is profoundly disconcerting. It was in my schooldays 
that " the Great Macdermott," elegant crush-hat in hand, 
his shirt-front shining and bulging like a great white flower 
of patriotism, bellowed the historic song from which Jin- 
goism took its name: 

"We don't want to fight but by Jingo if we do — " With 
what grim gusto we proclaimed in chorus — to the clash 
of beer-tankards — our sonorous determination that so long 
as Britons to themselves keep true, 

"The Russians shall not have Constantino-o-o-ple ! " 
But it was not Constantinople that was Russia's supreme 
objective in those days. That was India, and all through 
my schooldays I was obsessed by a vision of Russia on the 
pounce for it, was warned by my teachers to be on my guard 
against Russian wrigglings meandering steadfastly for the 
Himalayas. How grateful we schoolboys felt towards 
Afghanistan— so obviously erected by Providence as a 
"buffer-state." No wonder we saw Russia in Indian ink. 

And now all my boyish apprehensions and patriotic 
choruses have proved puerile indeed, a sheer waste of nerves 
and larynx. 

At a banquet to Russian Journalists in London, a famous 
Russian War Correspondent calmly observed that "of 
course there were cranks everywhere, but he could say from 
his seventy years' knowledge of Russian life that the people 



360 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

who dreamt about the Conquest of India could be found in 
Russia only in a mad-house." Shades of my schoolmasters! 
Manes of our politicians ! Levity seems too mild a word for 
the war-policy of your generation! The very Victorian 
hymn of Jingoism could not now be sung under the Defence 
of the Realm Act, and the Great Macdermott would be 
clapped into jail. Could even Tennyson's Maud pass 
uncensored, if anyone quoted the line about the Vengeance 
of God being wreaked on a giant-Tsar! As for the world- 
coveting will of Peter the Great, it is as mythical, says our 
Russian, as the Constitution of Otho or the donation of Con- 
stantine. Russia, in fact, covets no British territory, her 
mission is to spread Cossack Christendom through the 
East, and to throw the protection of her bureaucracy over 
the Slav peoples that have drifted too far westward from her 
great mother-wings. But though she covets no British 
territory, even Britain would gain by coming within her 
spiritual and political orbit. Have not British writers 
spontaneously testified that Russia's novelists open up for 
us new horizons of human fraternity, sound new notes of 
pity, reveal new perspectives of social freedom? 

And yet it is so difficult to shake off early teachings. 
Schoolmasters should really be careful to traffic only in 
truth absolute and eternal. Here am I still remembering 
the legends of the imprisonings and censorings of those 
very novelists, still singing that Britons never, never, never, 
shall be Slavs. An unworthy suggestion even comes up in 
my mind that the freedom of Russia may appeal so strongly 
to the British novelist because he — poor Pharisee-ridden 
wretch — cannot be improper even in his books, whereas a 
deputy of the Duma may walk about Petrograd with his 
mistress. A plague on my schoolmasters ! They taught me 
the six hundred and thirteen precepts of the Old Testament, 
but "love Russia" was not among them, and even the New 



ROSY RUSSIA 361 

Testament only tells me to love my "enemies," and my 
"enemies" are now settled for me by military law. My 
parlor-maid — as I have related — said to my wife the day 
Armageddon broke out: "The Germans are on our side, 
aren't they, mum?" On being corrected, she duly pro- 
ceeded — despite the New Testament — to hate the Germans 
and love the Russians. Those of us whose emotions are 
not so facile are being bullied, badgered or beguiled to go 
and do likewise. But "love light as air" refuses to be bound 
to a logical chain whose first link is Serbia. Nor do I see 
why love is required. Alliances, springing from common 
interests, but not from common blood, faith or political 
constitution, must remain merely military. To be faithful 
to our obligations is all that is necessary. It is a partnership, 
not a marriage bond, and when finances are pooled, too, 
what more can a partner ask? Why, most Englishmen 
have never seen a Russian, always excepting those that saw 
him pass in his myriads through England on that famous 
journey from Archangel to Flanders. Moreover, with our 
knowledge of the transitory and mutable character of 
Alliances, we should be foolish to contract them with emo- 
tions attached, emotions which we may soon have to unlearn 
or even to exchange. Possibly the real design of these 
exhortations to "love Russia" is upon our pockets. But 
that needs no press conspiracy, no special supplements. 
It is surely sufficient to show that, though Russia is prac- 
tically bankrupt, it is only for lack of ready money, and 
that her potential assets — in the hands of the British re- 
ceiver — are incalculable. Twirl a globe and see how this 
Colossus bestrides Europe and Asia, the greatest continuous 
Empire in the world and one of the least exploited. One 
may safely lend money to such a Power or sink it in such a 
Continent, and the more steadily Russia pays the interest 
and the dividends, the more she will be loved. To what end, 



362 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

then, these labored rhapsodies on Russia's religious genius? 
And above all, why glorify Russia's freedom from industrial- 
ism, when the effect, if not the object, of these very paeans 
is to open her up to British company promoters? The 
moujik is admirable indeed when sober — and though you 
cannot make men sober by Act of Parliament, it appears 
that you can by Imperial Ukase 1 — but the days of the 
Socialistic Mir are over, and it is not the Alliance with 
Britain that is going to keep Russia a land of ancient piety, 
fraternity, and pastoral simplicity. Nor is it likely that 
these are the qualities which Britain will now import from 
Russia, together with those delectable ballets, novels and 
symphonies, and still more delectable debentures. A natural 
optimism inclines me to believe that the Russians, who — 
whatever the real color of Russia — are assuredly a great 
and charming people, will not altogether escape the con- 
tagion of our democratic principles. I should be afraid 
that we in turn might not escape the infection of their bu- 
reaucracy did not our new geographers certify that Russian 
autocracy is only a more efficient and concentrated form of 
freedom. It is so comforting to know on unimpeachable 
authority that Darkest Russia, not Rosy Russia, is the 
mirage in the literary heaven, and that the rubescence 
which enchants us now is the herald of a new day and not, 
as we foolishly feared, the rosiness of blood. 

II 

It is the military necessity — which proverbially knows 
no law — that has become the mother of all this unnecessary 
invention — and it is in deference, I suppose, to British 

1 A writer in the Atlantic Monthly (December, 1915), said that after the 
first few weeks illicit distilling increased largely, and that injurious con- 
coctions are drunk in Russia, containing wood-alcohol, varnish, and even 
eau-de-cologne. 



ROSY RUSSIA 363 

Pharisaism that the great Russian people — constituted 
as it is of forty-eight races and a dozen creeds and embracing 
as it does some of the finest modern types on the planet — 
is presented by our Scotch sentimentalist as a cast com- 
munion of saints of the primitive peasant type. 

If any hint of the true heterogeneity is allowed to creep 
into the preposterous picture, it is by way of the Tartar, 
who brings odious order and Philistine prose into the divine 
carelessness, the glad camaraderie of the true Russian, and 
of whom the Russian Jew is probably only a long lost 
brother, converted to the Hebrew faith in the dark ages. 

It is no longer scratch the Russian and find the Tartar, 
but scratch the Jew — whom, indeed, it is far easier and 
more enjoyable to scratch. 

Britons have often been reproached for carrying their 
island with them on their travels — codum non animam 
mutant — but the island has always produced fantastic 
and rhapsodical travellers who go to the other extreme, 
and thus it is that Stephen Graham has found his soul in 
Russia, and in lieu of surveying Russia by the torchlight 
of British freedom, he brings back to Britain the ghostly 
gleam of the "Greek Fire," with which the miracle-monger- 
ing priests edify the Russian pilgrims in Jerusalem. 

In this "dim religious light" all the mediaeval specters 
glimmer and gibber again, the monstrous blood-myth 
resurges from its grave in Kiev, and England herself in 
that mysterious phosphorescence shows as an ugly and 
unchristian nation that has sold her soul to the devil of 
industrial development. If only Holy Russia can be saved 
from going likewise to the Jews — for, of course, it is this 
Oriental people that has made the West Occidental! 

When John Ruskin preached to John Bull against rail- 
ways and factories, Britain was consumed with laughter, 
but to-day, when a Scotchman Ruskinizes for Russia, he 



364 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

is hailed almost as a European redeemer. Simplicity, as 
Oscar Wilde said, is the last refuge of the complex. 

So, too, "backwards" is the last cry of progress. The 
latest young Englishman prostrates himself before ikons, 
and English schoolgirls prattle of that sweetly pretty piety 
of the moujik. 

And shall Russian Jews, ungraced by this precious faith, 
overflow their Pale and spread all over Russia to batten 
and fatten upon the exploitation of her resources and ruin 
the Pastoral Paradise of the true-born Russian? Never 
while Stephen Graham is alive to save the country of his 
second birth! 

It all reminds one irresistibly of Defoe's " True-born 
Englishman:" 

"Scots from the northern frozen banks of Tay 
With packs and plods came whigging all away; 
Thick as the locusts which in Egypt swarmed, 
With pride and hungry hopes completely armed; 
With native truth, diseases and no money, 
Plundered our Canaan of the milk and honey. 
Here they grew quickly Lords and Gentlemen, 
And all their race are True-Born Englishmen." 

Our Scotch scribe not only boasts himself a "true-born 
Englishman," but he has become a "Real Russian" into 
the bargain. The last hope of the "Black Hundreds," he 
babbles of ritual murders to make Shylock's pound of flesh 
creep, and has assimilated their archaic policy of segregat- 
ing the Scots — I mean the Jews — by a Roman wall. 

I could almost fancy myself listening again to that Rus- 
sian baroness who, brought to luncheon at my house one 
day by a common friend, fell to expatiating on the "terrible 
problem" of the Jews in Russia. A sympathetic soul, 
thought I, till gradually I became aware that the "terrible 
problem" was not for the Jews but for the Russians. 



ROSY RUSSIA 365 

Once, in fact, permit these terrible Hebrews to escape 
from their Pale, once allow them the educational and in- 
dustrial facilities of their fellow-Russians, and hey presto! 
they are the rulers of Russia. 

It is only when one looks at maps and figures that the 
complete silliness of this Slavinic superstition breaks upon 
one. The Russian Empire — even without the territorial 
gains the war may bring it — stretches over nearly nine 
million square miles and occupies one-sixth of the land 
surface of the globe. Siberia alone is more than a million 
miles larger than the whole of Europe. 

And this Empire, which, like the United States, has the 
supreme advantage of continuousness, is inhabited by 
nearly a hundred and eighty million people, of whom only 
six millions are Jews. And it is these six millions — one 
in thirty of the population — who, given a free field and no 
disfavor, are to dominate Russia, the tip of the tail wagging 
the Bear! It is a great compliment to the Jews but it is 
also a great absurdity. 

Contemporary politics shows us numerous examples of 
races kept from equal rights with the governing race on 
the ground — or pretext — of intellectual inferiority; that 
is, for example, the justification of the "white man's bur- 
den." But I hardly recall any other example of a white 
people crushed down by another white people on the ground 
of its admitted superiority. And from a simple geographical 
point of view what the ruling majority claims is to bar one 
of the greatest and oldest members of the human family 
from access to nearly a sixth of the globe. And this insolent 
and inhuman claim is enforced not only against Russia's 
own Jews, but against subjects of her Allies like myself. 
The utter unreason of this claim stands out more vividly 
when it is recalled that in the larger hah of this prohibited 
area — in Siberia — only ten millions of people eke out a 



366 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

livelihood, and that a continent half as large again as the 
United States has been left almost in primaeval forest. Is 
there any reason why the Jews, instead of being cooped up 
in stinking poverty in the towns of the Pale, should not 
be invited to carve out a province with the ploughshare 
from these vast neglected territories? 

The Russian Jews are, according to Mr. Graham him- 
self, "a great people," even "a people of genius." Physi- 
cally they are a far finer type than the Western Jews; 
spiritually, they bubble with artistic vitality of every sort. 

And while the majority are sunk in their native piety 
and poverty, that feckless faith which our sentimental 
tramp adores when it is tangled up with trinities, there is 
an industrial and commercial minority which is infinitely 
more valuable to Russia than her deposits of coal or petro- 
leum. 

If Russia proper is an aggregation of analphabetic peas- 
ants, all the more reason why that section of her population 
which possesses an ancient tradition of culture should 
gratify its passion for education. 

If Russia proper is inapt for industry and has hitherto 
been exploited by her German enemies, is not that the 
very reason why she should now be developed by her Jewish 
citizens, why she should yoke their financial talents to the 
service of the State? 

These six millions of Jews are here body and soul. They 
love the soil which they have inhabited for centuries, in 
some cases longer than the "true-born Russians." 

The truest Christians in Russia, they are ready to for- 
give the unspeakable past. They ask nothing better than 
to live and die for "Mother Russia," and if the still more 
ancient "Mother Zion" has been invoked these latter days, 
it was from sheer hopelessness of ever being treated as 
children of Russia. 



ROSY RUSSIA 367 

Was there ever a more deplorable example of muddled 
statescraft? A Tsar who throws away so rich a tender of 
love and service is no "Little Father:" he is a "Prodigal 
Son." 

Equal rights for the Jew — or even equal wrongs with 
the Russian — would indeed bring a problem — but for the 
Jew: the problem of his dissolution in the melting-pot of 
common citizenship. But to the Russian this enfranchise- 
ment of the Jew would be the solution, not the establish- 
ment, of a problem. And this problem was never more 
than a mirage, a Brocken spectre, a phantasm born of 
ignorance and fear, a superfluous addition to the sorrows 
of peoples and the cares of kings. I know, indeed, no more 
tragic purblindness in history than that Russia, endowed 
with a human asset of value incalculable and incomparable, 
should see herself burdened instead of enriched. 

She has a treasure and can see only a problem. The 
pity and folly of it all. 1 

1 Since this article was written — and refused publication by Liberal ed- 
itors — M. Chukovsky, one of the leading journalists who recently visited us, 
has published in the Russkoe Slovo, an article very much in this vein, and the 
Petrograd Correspondent of the Times has sensibly translated it for the 
Literary Supplement, of March 16, 1916. He wonders whether the flood of 
books in praise of Russia will not submerge London, " Glorious Russia," 
" Friendly Russia," " Contemporary Russia," etc., etc. 

"Mr. Stephen Graham has already written about half-a-dozen books on 
Russia, and will write at least two dozen more before the war is over. Judg- 
ing by his photograph he loves to wear a Russian shirt and bark shoes. His 
hair is cut in the ultra-Russian style. Some time ago he travelled with our 
pilgrims to Jerusalem to pray at the sacred shrine, and ever since then he has 
held forth about the mystical mission of Russia. He takes himself to be a 
disciple of Dostoievsky, but in reality he is a smart journalist who is making 
the best of a fashionable subject. 

" 'Down with Virgil, long live Pushkin! ' exclaims one of our admirers, and 
prophesies that Oxford students will soon relinquish the one to take up the 
other. 'Livy will be superseded by Karamzin; Plato by Vladimir Soloviev.' 
'The Russian language will take the place of Greek and Latin in all schools 
in Europe.' ' War and Peace is the greatest novel ever written.' 'The future 



368 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

belongs only to Russia, not to France, not even to England.' These are 
samples culled from the same source. 

"English people do not fully realize that there are many Russias, not one, 
and that sometimes Mary is very anxious to be Martha. Until I had read all 
these books I had no idea we were so good. Our reflection in the English 
looking-glass makes us look very handsome. It appears we are the freest 
people in the world. Who would have thought it? All Europeans have 
cause for envy, it seems. I learnt this to-day from Mr. Garstin's book." 

It is odd in this connection that the Russia Society, founded at the 
Speaker's House amid universal newspaper applause, to foment friendly 
relations between the two countries, should have come under the criticism of 
the Daily Chronicle for its lack of a responsible Committee and Treasurer, and 
that the "Russian Chamber of Commerce" should be disavowed both by 
Russia and the Foreign Office. 



AT THE CONGRESS 

Six hundred gentlemen in Western costume, 
A tribune, Presidents, Vice-Presidents, 

Motions, Amendments, Votes, a mort of papers, 
Programmes and Budgets, Parties, Factions, Groups, 

Leaders and sheep, the passionless Reporters, 
White-hot orations, cheers and counter-cheers, 

Interruptions, rulings, points of order, hisses, 
Invective, passion, personalities, 

Volcanic jets, vibrations, scenes in the Chamber, 
A Jewish Parliament ! 

Alas! this solid-seeming Hebrew House of Commons, 

With all its vivid drama, 
For want of one thing is a painted show, 

A filmy phanto-mime, a picture play. 

Is it because it stands in a Christian city? 

That even the House is hired for a week from the heathen ? 
And in alien tongues the speakers shout for Zion, 

Sans common speech for Mother Zion's children? 
These are mere echoes from the emptiness, 

But not its heart. 
For all these Parliaments, Chambers, Reichstags, Dumas, 

With their Presidents and Premiers, 
In their broadcloth and fine linen, 

And their Statesmen, 
Be they guardians of the nation's great tradition, 

Or seers and spinners of its nobler future, 
All these eloquent expounders; 

In these fora of civilization, 
And all the floors they take, these high-toned speakers, 

All the polished planks beneath their spotless shoes, 
Rest — and without them were but scraps of paper — 

On bayonets. 

369 



370 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

Bayonets trained — see the Soldier's Vade-mecum — 
To twist in the entrails. 

Yea, hid by all the sober civic ritual, 

Unseen beneath the Ministers and Members, 

A glittering forest of steel upholds the Chamber, 
The people's bones have made its gleaming pillars, 

The frescoes on its old historic walls 
Are Blood. 

For as of old in those far-famous cities 
Now sunk to burrows that the pick explores 

Four thousand years beneath our year of grace, 
They built their houses over human offerings, 

So still upon foundation-sacrifices, 
Rises the Talking House in Christendom. 

It is not that we lack these dark foundations, 
Our bones upprop the Parliaments of Europe, 

Our young men die but not for dreams of ours, 
Nor for the honor of the God of Israel. 

And even those who dream the dream of Zion, 
Beglamored by the shining Tower of David, 

Like birds that dash themselves against a lighthouse, 
Shattered and bleeding drop into the darkness. 

But hark! A witty speaker holds the Congress! 

The bored reporters scrawl in shorthand, "Laughter!" 



THE STORY OF THE STEAM-ROLLER 



Not to be published 
Press Bureau 



37i 



BEZALEL 

Bezalel, filled with wisdom to design 

Stones, precious woods, rich-broidered fabrics, gold, 

Fed not the few with cunning manifold 

Nor empty loveliness: his art divine 

Set up a Tabernacle as a sign 

Of oneness for a rabble many-souled, 

So that each span of desert should behold 

A nomad people with a steadfast shrine. 

But we, its sons, who wander in the dark, 
Footsore, far-scattered, growing less and less, 
What whiteness gleams our brotherhood to mark, 
What promised land our journey's end to bless? 
We are, unless we build some shrine and ark, 
A dying rabble in a wilderness. 



373 



THE WAR AND THE JEWS 

[Originally published July, 191 5. Slightly revised, but the fog of 
war and censorship prevents absolute accuracy up to date.] 

Across the Eastern sky has glowed 

The flicker of a blood-red dawn. 
Once more the clarion cock has crowed, 

Once more the sword of Christ is drawn. 
A million burning rooftrees light 
The world-wide path of Israel's flight. 

Where is the Hebrew's fatherland? 

The folk of Christ is sore bested; 
The Son of Man is bruised and banned, 

Nor finds whereon to lay his head. 
His cup is gall, his meat is tears, 
His passion lasts a thousand years. 

Emma Lazarus. 



The Hebrew Humpty Dumpty 

The first thing to grasp, if you would understand the 
Jewish question, is that the Jews do not exist. Six hundred 
thousand Jews are fighting in the war, but not the Jews. 
Their fighting ended in the year 133, with the revolt of Bar 
Cochba against the Romans. Josephus's History of the 
Jews gets as far as the year 73, and is thus still almost up- 
to-date. The Jewries of the world are now mere scattered 
shards of a broken vessel, though the potsherds fill more 
space than the original pot. Two-and-two no longer make 

374 



THE WAR AND THE JEWS 375 

one, they only make four. An international Jewry with 
international aims is a myth. "Israel's mission is Peace" 
is the motto printed on the books of the Jewish Publication 
Society of America, and it is a true interpretation of the 
voice of Jerusalem. But Israel is no more organized for 
peace than for war. Twenty thousand Jews are fighting 
for the British Empire, 50,000 for the German, 170,000 for 
the Austro-Hungarian, and 350,000 for the Russian. 

The shade of Josephus might have looked around for his 
stylus in i860, when the French Jews founded the Alliance 
Israelite Universelle on an international basis. But this 
attempt at federation under the hegemony of French Jewry 
was shattered by the Franco-Prussian war. Since 1870 it is 
German Jewry that has been pushing for predominance, 
with or without a democratic basis. Just before the war it 
was waging a bitter fight for the adoption of German as the 
language of the Technical Institute of Haifa (Syria). Other 
of the founders, as well as the Jews of Palestine, not un- 
naturally favored Hebrew. When Turkey joined the war 
the Bismarcks of the Berlin Ghetto took advantage of their 
position in Palestine to buy up the institution! The Zionist 
movement, started in 1896, with its more democratic striv- 
ing for a unified Israel, likewise fell under German Jewish 
control. But at the outbreak of war the international 
organ of the movement — Die Welt — was suspended and 
the German Zionist Federation coolly used its local or- 
ganization for the gathering of German volunteers. To its 
call to arms for the Fatherland its numerous student and 
gymnastic societies, both in Berlin and the provinces, re- 
sponded almost to a youth. 1 Once more has the attempt to 

1 Out of the 950 members of the Zionist Students' Corporation 722 have 
borne arms, and 214 have gained distinctions, a remarkable percentage, 
showing brains and bravery go together. According to an article in the 
Vossischc Zcitung by Professor Ludwig Stein there have been 286 Jewish 
Lieutenants. 



376 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

put Humpty Dumpty together again, proved a labor of 
Tantalus. 

II 

The Wandering Jew 

"There is no luck for Israel," says the Talmud. In- 
dividual Jews are frequently shrewd and fortunate, but as a 
people Israel is, in his own expressive idiom, a Schlemihl, a 
hapless ne'er-do-well. Twenty centuries of wandering find 
him concentrated precisely in the plain of Armageddon. 
And here in a hundred places he must again grasp the Wan- 
derer's staff. Symbolic is the figure of the Chief Rabbi of 
Serbia wandering across Europe to beg for his pitiful flock. 
A workhouse and a hostel at London have been congested 
with Belgian Jews. Forty ravaged towns have poured 
their Ghettos into Warsaw: Prague, Vienna, Budapest, 
seethe sullenly with refugees. Vienna, indeed, refused to re- 
ceive any Galician refugee who could not show ten pounds; 
Hungary was even stonier. A census taken of 4,653 
Jews who fled into Alexandria showed subjects of England, 
France, Russia, Spain, America, Turkey, Persia, Rumania, 
Italy, Greece and Serbia, while another thousand had 
already wandered farther — to other Egyptian cities, to 
America, Australia, South Africa, Russia. Before our guns 
1,500 Jews fled from the Dardanelles. The only important 
section of Jewry that has escaped the war is that which has 
poured itself into the American Melting Pot and even there 
the banks on the east side failed! And not only are ten of 
the thirteen millions of Jewry in the European cockpit, 
nearly three millions are at the fiercest centre of fighting — 
in Poland. 

Poland — be it German, Russian, or Austrian Poland — is 
pre-eminently the home of Jewry, and Poland, even more 
than Belgium, has been the heart of hell. For two of the 



THE WAR AND THE JEWS 377 

Powers that combined to dismember it are now righting 
the third across its fragments, and Jewish populations are 
at their thickest along those six hundred miles of border 
country through which Russia invades East Prussian Po- 
land or Galician Poland, Germany hacks her way towards 
Warsaw, or Austria hurls her counter-attacks. 

It is upon the Ghettos of Lomzha and Bialystok that the 
bombs of the German airmen do their deadliest work; 
Czernowitz, the capital of Bukowina, which has been twice 
taken by the Russians, and re-taken by the Austrians, 
holds 15,000 Jews, or forty per cent of the mishmash of 
races. For seven hundred years Poland has been a haven 
for Jewry — volcanic though the soil has proved at periodic 
eruptions of Jew-hate. The royal marriage that united the 
territories of Catholic Poland with Greek-Church Lith- 
uania produced a sundering of State and religion by which 
the Jews of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries profited, 
while in the sixteenth century, when the great expulsion 
of the Jews from Spain and Portugal had infected Germany 
and France with the virus of persecution, the accident of a 
series of peculiarly wise and tolerant monarchs opened 
Poland to a still larger volume of Jewish immigration, and 
even gave its Jews a measure of autonomy and dignity. 
They were the recognized providers of an urban and indus- 
trial population to a mainly agricultural people. Thus were 
they collected for the holocaust of to-day. For, of course, 
the partition of Poland left them still pullulating, whether 
in Prussian Danzig, Russian Warsaw, or Austrian Lemberg. 
And not only have they duplicated the tragedy of the 
Poles in having to fight what is practically a civil war, not 
only have they suffered almost equally in the ruin of Poland, 
so poignantly described by Paderewski, in the burnings, 
bombardings, pillagings, tramplings; not only have they 
shared in the miseries of towns taken and retaken by the 



37^ THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

rival armies, but they have been accused hysterically or 
craftily before both belligerents, of espionage or treachery, 
and even of poisoning the wells, and crucified by both. 
Hundreds have been imprisoned as hostages, shot, knouted, 
hanged, buried alive; women have been outraged, whole 
populations have fled, some before the enemy, many 
hounded out by their own military authorities, wandering — 
but not into the wide world. Into the towns outside the 
Pale they might not escape — these were not open even to 
the wounded soldier. In the long history of the martyr- 
people there is no ghastlier chapter. Yet it is lost — and nec- 
essarily lost — in the fathomless ocean of Christian suffering, 
in the great world-tragedy. But while Poland and Belgium 
are crowned by their sorrows and cheered by the hope of 
re-birth, while the agony of Belgium has become an im- 
mortal heroic memory, the agony of Israel is obscure and 
unknown, unlightened by sympathy, unredeemed by any 
national prospect, happy if it only escapes mockery. It 
is related that when one of these ejected footsore popu- 
lations, wandering at midnight on the wintry roads, with 
their weeping young children, met marching regiments of 
their own army, the women stretched out their hands in 
frantic beseechment to the Jews in the ranks. But the 
Jewish soldiers could only weep like the children — and 
march on. 

Ill 

To Their Tents, O Israel 

"You are the only people," said Agrippa, trying to hold 
back the Jews of Palestine from rising against the Roman 
Empire, "who think it a disgrace to be servants of those to 
whom all the world hath submitted." To-day, servants of 
all who have harbored them, the Jews are spending them- 



THE WAR AND THE JEWS 379 

selves passionately in the service of all. At the outbreak of 
the war an excited Englishwoman, hearing that the Cologne 
Gazette, said to be run by Jews, was abusing England, wrote 
to me, foaming at the quill, demanding that the Jews should 
stop the paper. That the Jews do not exist, or that an 
English Jew could not possibly interfere with the patriotic 
journalism of a German subject, nay, that the abuse in the 
Cologne Gazette was actually a proof of Jewish loyalty, did 
not occur to the worthy lady. Yet the briefest examination 
of the facts would have shown her that the Jews merely 
reflect their environment, if with a stronger tinge of color 
due to their more vivid temperament, their gratitude and 
attachment to their havens and fatherlands, and their 
anxiety to prove themselves more patriotic than the patriots. 
It is but rarely that a Jew makes the faintest criticism of 
his country in war-fever, and when he does so he is dis- 
avowed by his community and its Press. For the Jew his 
country can do no wrong. Wherever we turn, therefore, 
we find the Jew prominently patriotic. 1 In England the 
late Lord Rothschild presided over the Red Cross Fund, 
and the Lord Chief Justice is understood to have saved the 
financial situation not only for England, but for all her 
Allies. In Germany Herr Ballin, the Jew who refused the 
baptismal path to preferment, the creator of the Mercantile 
Marine, and now the organizer of the national food supply, 
stands as the Kaiser's friend, interpreter and henchman; 
great organizing work at the War Office has also been 
done by Herr Rathenau, while Maximilian Harden brazenly 
voices the gospel of Prussianism, and Ernst Lissauer — a 

^he film-play "Wake Up," which has brought 30,000 recruits, was 
written by a British Jew and boomed by a popular daily with a Jewish editor. 
Sergeant Mick Cohen, of the 4th Batt. Royal Fusiliers, has recruited some 
3,000 men for his regiment and is popularly known as "The King's Re- 
cruiter." A Liverpool Minister was dismissed for favoring the conscientious 
objector, and the Chief Rabbi decided "Priests" may serve. 



380 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

Jew converted to the religion of Love — sings "The Song 
of Hate." In France, Dreyfus— a more Christian Jew, 
albeit unbaptized — has charge of a battery to the north of 
Paris, while General Heymann, Grand Officer of the Legion 
of Honor, commands an Army Corps. In Turkey, the 
racially Jewish Enver Bey * is the ruling spirit, having 
defeated the Jewish Djavid Bey, who was for alliance with 
France, while Italy, on the contrary, has joined the Allies 
through the influence of Baron Sonnino, the son of a Jew, 
with the co-operation of the Republican leader Salvatore 
Barzillai, now a member of the Cabinet, in which, too, 
Luzzeth is Finance Minister. The military hospitals of 
Turkey are all under the direction of the Austrian Jew, 
Hecker. In Hungary it is the Jews who, with the Magyars, 
are the brains of the nation. Belgium has sent several 
thousand Jews to the colors, and, at a moment when 
Belgium's fate hangs upon England, has entrusted her 
interests at the Court of St. James to a Jewish Minister, 
Mr. Hymans and their Chief Rabbi has persisted, in defiance 
of the Germans, in praying every Sabbath in Brussels for 
King Albert, and thus bringing upon himself six months' con- 
finement in Germany. Two thousand five hundred Jews fight 
for Serbia, and rather more for Italy, which has many Jewish 
officers. Even from Morocco and Tripoli come Jewish 
troops — they number 20 to 30 per cent of the Zouaves. 2 
Nor are the British Colonies behind the French. From 

1 Enver Bey belongs to the Donmehs, the Jews who, in the mystic year 
1666, followed "The Turkish Messiah" to Islam. See my "Dreamers of the 
Ghetto." 

2 The Zouave, Judah ben Barok, has received two war-medals. Severely 
wounded, he rallied the other men, crying "My life is of no consequence. 
Vive la France!" The Algerian Jewess, Sarah Zelish, a widow, gave up 
all her eight sons to fight for France. Per contra, a widow at Budapest, Rosa 
Tritz, has given seven sons to the Hungarian colors and Vera Loeb of 
Zweibrucken, eight sons to the German. 



THE WAR AND THE JEWS 38 1 

Australia, New Zealand, from Canada, South Africa, from 
every possession and dependency, stream Jewish soldiers or 
sailors. Even the little contingent from Rhodesia had 
Jews, and the first British soldier to fall in German South- 
West Africa was Ben Rabinson, a famous athlete. In 
Buluwayo half a company of reserves is composed of Jews, 
altogether some five thousand Jews have been fighting in 
South Africa. One Spanish Jewish family has three sons 
in the Belgian army, two in the Canadian force, and one a 
Derby volunteer. Of such is the brotherhood of Israel. 
When Joseph Chamberlain offered the Zionists a plateau 
in East Africa, the half-dozen local Britons held a "mass- 
meeting" of protest. Yet to-day, though the offer was 
rejected of the Zionists, fifty Jewish volunteers — among 
them Captain Blumenthal, of the Artillery, and Lieutenant 
Eckstein, of the Mounted Rifles — are serving in the Defence 
Force enlisted at Nairobi. Letters from British Jews 
published in a single number of the Jewish World, taken 
at random, reveal the writers as with the Australian fight- 
ing force in Egypt, with the Japanese at the taking of 
Tsingtau, with the Grand Fleet in the North Sea, while 
the killed and wounded in the same issue range over almost 
every British regiment, from the historic Black Watch, 
Grenadier Guards, or King's Own Scottish Borderers down 
to the latest Middlesex and Manchester creations, The 
old world and the new are indeed at clash when a Jewish 
sailor on Passover eve, in lieu of sitting pillowed at the 
immemorial ritual meal, is at his big gun, "my eye fixed 
to the telescopic lights and an ear in very close proximity to 
an adjacent navy-phone, and the remainder of the time 
with my head on a projectile for a pillow." Anglo- Jewry, 
once the home of timorous mothers and Philistine fathers, 
has become a Maccabaean stronghold. One distinguished 
family alone — the Spielmanns — boasts thirty-five members 



382 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

with the forces. 1 Another — the Beddingtons — claims thirty- 
nine. A letter of thanks from the King has published the 
fact that an obscure Jew in a London suburb has five sons 
at the front. In another family (the Hamburgers) with five 
sons at the front, one came from Australia to enlist and one 
from the Argentine. 2 From Cairo hails a private of the 
19th London regiment, a champion wrestler of nearly six 
feet four, who is said to speak thirteen languages including 
Tartar and Serbian! And in all these armies the old 
Maccabaean valor which had not feared to challenge the 
Roman Empire at its mightiest, and to subdue which a 
favorite general had to be detached from the less formidable 
Britain, has been proved afresh. 3 "The Jewish bravery 
astonished us all," said the Vice-Governor of Kovno, 
and, indeed, the heroism of the Russian Jew has become a 

1 The richly-promising Captain Harold L. J. Spielmann was killed in 
Gallipoli. 

2 At the beginning of January, 1915, I wrote the following appeal 
for Jewish recruits: "Now that English women and babes are being 
bombarded in cold blood by German pirates, no man who enjoys the 
priceless prerogative of British citizenship can without shame refuse to 
rally to Britain's defence. Especially does this duty — this proud privilege — 
fall on the sons of a homeless race that in Britain — almost alone in the 
world — have found liberty, equality, and fraternity. The mere fact that the 
Lord Chief Justice belongs to the race that even in ' cultured ' Germany is 
only half-emancipated, shows that in England Justice is Lord and Chief, and 
that the downfall or even the bare defeat of Britain would be a disaster to 
civilization. I rejoice that our young Jews by enlisting in more than their 
due proportion have already testified their super-devotion to the Empire that 
spreads its wings over us, and I rejoice equally that the War Office, by ac- 
cording them the opportunity of serving together, has recognized that their 
feeling of special brotherhood is only another link in the mighty and multi- 
ple chain of the Empire, and that their union is only a greater strength for 
the service of England. May your Sh6far-call rouse the old Maccabaean 
thrill of heroic ardor and sacrifice!" 

3 A Canadian lad, not yet thirteen, hid as a stowaway, managed to get to 
the front as a trumpeter and despatch-carrier, and was wounded. No won- 
der Lord Kitchener remarked of him, "There's blood for you." The blood, 
however, was that of the famous Samuel Salant, Rabbi at Jerusalem, whose 
grandson he is. 



THE WAR AND THE JEWS 383 

household word. More than four hundred privates — they 
cannot be officers — were accorded the Order of St. George 
within a few weeks, as well as a nurse whose name is cen- 
sored. One Jew, who brought down a German aeroplane, 
was awarded all four degrees of the Order at once. Another 
has received a gold medal for exceptional bravery. "The 
capture of the line of Jaroslav forts," says the Times (Oct. 4, 
1 9 14) "was directly due to the heroism and cleverness 
of a young private." In England Lieutenant de Pass won 
the Victoria cross for carrying a wounded man out of heavy 
fire, and perished a few hours later in trying to capture a 
German sap. Two other Jews figure among the V. C's., 
and many in the lesser distinctions. In Austria up to the 
end of the year the Jews had won 651 medals, crosses, etc. 
In France Sergeant Netter gained the much coveted 
military medal. "I give my life for the victory of France 
and the peace of the world, " wrote a young immigrant Jew 
who died on the battlefield. A collection of letters from 
German soldiers, published by the Jewish Book-shop of 
Berlin, reveals equal devotion to Germany, where the 
Jews have shared to the full in the rain of "iron crosses." 
(5868 up to the end of March, twenty-six of the First Class.) 
The King of Serbia has paid express tribute to "the con- 
stancy, the valor and the devotion of the Jews who are 
serving in my army." And to the question, "What shall 
it profit the Jew to fight for the whole world?" a Yiddish 
journalist, Mr. Morris Meyer, has found a noble answer. 
There is a unity behind all this seeming self-contradiction, 
he points out. "All these Jews are dying for the same 
thing- -for the honor of the Jewish name." 



384 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

IV 

"sufferance the badge" 

And yet these are not really Jewish forces even in the 
religious sense, for they waive their religious demands. 
The Anglo-Jewish volunteer, who might easily stipulate 
for special treatment, accepts the very disregard of his 
dietary and ritual that constitutes the tragedy of Russo- 
Jewish conscription. While the Indian troops are scrupu- 
lously safeguarded in their dietary, while beef and pork 
are kept religiously remote, while the Mohammedan, Sikh 
and Hindoo have each their slaughterer to kill the goats, 
by "halal" for the Moslem and by "jatka" for the others, 
the Jewish soldiers in England, France and Germany are 
limited to army-chaplains or Field-Rabbis who distribute 
prayer-books and administer to the dying (when they 
chance to come upon them) the consolations of their neg- 
lected religion. Soldiers under the ever-present shadow of 
death are naturally susceptible to their childish memories. 
"On Seder night," wrote an English recruit from the 
trenches, "I could picture everyone at home, sitting round 
the Passover table, and the thought made me feel as if 
I could cry my eyes out." A Jewish battalion would ap- 
parently have attracted volunteers both racially and 
spiritually. And yet the Anglo-Jewish community frowned 
upon the suggestion, and the Jewish chaplain himself, 
the zealous hard-worked chaplain whose labors would 
have been so lightened by concentration, did his best to 
keep his flock sundered and dispersed. This instinctive 
shrinking from solidarity is doubtless a heritage of the 
tragic centuries. The Jew is so old and worldly wise. 
Experience has burnt into him that together with the move- 
ment of attraction towards the Jew in moments of na- 
tional crisis — simultaneously with the process that knits 



THE WAR AND THE JEWS 385 

him with the nation in love and service — goes a reverse 
movement of repulsion. The very drawing-together of 
the nation in the stress and zest and blood-sacrifice of war 
enhances the national consciousness and rouses a keener 
historic sense of the native tradition, before which the 
Jew looms more foreign than ever. 

Thus, even in England, prejudice has wakened in the 
Provinces, particularly at Leeds. In Liverpool cabinet- 
makers have refused to work with Jewish craftsmen, even 
in war contracts. And in a southern seaport there is a 
grimly amusing story of a Jewish chemist, who in the 
exuberant patriotism begotten of ten happy and pros- 
perous years in England, resolved to put up war-bulletins 
in his highly popular shop-window. He started well enough 
with "England declared war against Germany at 11 p. m. 
last night." Unfortunately some inner imp of mischief, 
taking advantage of his imperfect idiom, inspired him to 
add in a burst of loyal emotion, "God help England!" 
The town was instantly ablaze. England needed no such 
help, the poor bewildered patriot was assured with oaths, 
she was quite able to beat Germany off her own bat. And 
under a shower of stones which broke his windows and 
shattered those wonderful blue and green bottles, he fled 
for his life through the back door. Truly the Jew has 
obeyed the maxim of Nietzsche to "live dangerously." 
He has lived with all peoples, from the Greeks and Romans 
to the Germans and the French, from Assyrians to Amer- 
icans, and his instinctive fear of them all is a lurid sidelight 
on the history of the world. As a commentary on Chris- 
tianity it is too sad for tears. 



386 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

V 

The Riddle of Russo -Jewry 

The devotion of the Jew to the British flag needs no 
explanation. Both socially and by legislation England has 
given the world a lesson in civilization. And if France 
only just escaped the pollution of the Dreyfus affair, if 
Germany and Austria are anti-Semitic in temper, all these 
countries have yet given the Jew his constitutional rights, 
and the Kaiser in particular has had the sense and the spirit 
to turn his ablest Jews into friends and henchmen. The 
appointment of several hundred officers during the war has 
probably removed the last tangible grievance of German 
Jewry. As for Turkey she has been since 1492 a refuge of 
Jewry from Christian persecution, while Italy, which has 
had a Jewish Prime Minister as well as a Jewish War 
Minister (Count Ottolenghi) stands equal with England 
in justice to the Jew. But that the Russian Jews, yet 
reeking from the blood of a hundred pogroms, should have 
thrown themselves into Russia's struggle with almost 
frenzied fervor, this is, indeed, a phenomenon that invites 
investigation, and invites it all the more because the 
Jews in America, remote from the new realities, continue 
their barren curses against Russia, and include in their 
malisons those who, like myself, proclaim the cause of the 
Allies the cause of civilization. 

It would be easy to dismiss the enthusiasm of the Rus- 
sian Jews as more politic than patriotic or to say that they 
have made a virtue of necessity. But it bears all the marks 
of a sincere upwelling, a spiritual out-reaching to their 
fellow-Russians. Such scenes as marked the proclamation 
of war have never been known in Russian Jewry. The 
Jewish Deputy in the Duma and the Jewish press were at 
one in proffering heart and soul to the country. From the 



THE WAR AND THE JEWS 387 

Great Synagogue of St. Petersburg five thousand Jews, 
headed by the Crown Rabbi, marched to the Tsar's Palace, 
and kneeling before it, sang Hebrew hymns and the Russian 
Anthem. Their flags bore the motto: "There are no Jews 
or Gentiles now." At Kieff ten thousand Jews, carrying 
Russian banners and the Scrolls of the Law, paraded the 
town, and similar demonstrations occurred wherever Jews 
dwelt. A Warsaw writer records that the Jews wept with 
emotion in the synagogues as they prayed for Russia's vic- 
tory. Thousands of youths who had escaped conscription 
offered themselves as volunteers; in Rostoff even a girl 
smuggled herself in among them and went through several 
battles before she was detected. The older generation 
poured out its money in donatives. The Dowager Empress 
accepted and named a Red Cross Hospital. One wealthy 
Jew in the province of Kherson undertook to look after 
all the families of Reservists in six villages, or 1380 souls. 

Something must perhaps be discounted for the hysteria 
and hypnosis of war-time. And other factors than pa- 
triotism proper may have entered into the enthusiasm. 
The young generation had reached the breaking point. 
Baffled of every avenue of distinction, the most brilliant 
blocked from the schools and universities by the diabolical 
device of admitting even the small percentage by ballot 
and not by merit, grown hopeless of either Palestine with- 
out or the Social Revolution within, the young Jews hovered 
gloomily between suicide and baptism, between depravity 
and drink. Some with a last glimmer of conscience and 
faith had thought to avoid the stigma of Christianity by 
becoming merely Mohammedans: others to dodge at least 
the Greek Church had exploited an Episcopalian mis- 
sionary. But even for these Russia refused to open up a 
career. To this desperate generation the war came as 
an outlet from a blind alley, a glad adventure. Hence 



388 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

the reckless bravery on the battlefield. But there was 
reason, too, in the ecstasy. England, ever the Jew's star 
of hope, was at last to fight side by side with Russia. For 
the Russian the Alliance was a pride, for the Jew an augury 
of Liberty. The great democracies of the West would 
surely drag Russia in their train. And for the elders the 
fear of Germany was the beginning of wisdom. The very 
first day of the war she had taken possession of the unde- 
fended town of Kalicz on the Russian border and in this 
town, more than a third Jewish, had initiated her policy of 
"f rightfulness." And mingling with this sinister first im- 
pression came the stories of wealthy Jews returning from 
Karlsbad, Wiesbaden and other summer resorts from 
which they had been ejected as "alien enemies." The 
Jew began to cling to the devil he knew, to realize that, 
after all, Russia was his home. 

But when every allowance is made for lower factors, 
there remains a larger and deeper truth underlying the 
enthusiasm, the truth which it takes a poet to feel and 
which found its best expression in the words of the Russo- 
Yiddish writer, Shalom Asch, whose dramas have been 
played in Berlin and whose books published in English. 
Germany's aeroplanes had rained down on the Pale not 
bombs but leaflets, announcing herself as the deliverer of 
the oppressed and promising to grant the Jews equal rights. 
To these seductive attempts to exploit the Jewish resent- 
ment against Russia, Shalom Asch answered sternly: "'The 
oppressed peoples under the Russian yoke' have risen as 
one man against the German bird of prey. . . . The 
Jews are marching in the Russian ranks for the defence of 
their Fatherland. Nor is it the youth alone that has done 
its duty. In every town of Russia Jews have established 
committees: our sisters are joining the Red Cross, our 
fathers are collecting funds. . . . Thousands of Russo- 



THE WAR AND THE JEWS 389 

Jewish volunteers have enlisted in France . . . even from 
America, where Germany has tried to exploit our suffer- 
ings, they are beginning to come. For this is not a war to 
defend the Russian bureaucracy which is responsible for 
the pogroms, but to defend the integrity of our Father- 
land. . . . Nor do we do our duty in order to 'earn' 
equal rights . . . but because, deeply hidden in our hearts, 
there is a burning feeling for Russia. . . . Look at America 
where hundreds of societies and streets bear the names of 
our Russian towns. . . . No Pale, no restrictions, no 
pogroms, can eradicate from our hearts this natural feeling 
of love for our country, and God be thanked for it! . . . 
Nobody gives a Fatherland and nobody can take it away. 
We have been in Russia as long as the Slav peoples. The 
history of the Jews in Poland begins with the very first 
page of Polish history. Equal rights must be ours because 
for a thousand years and more we have absorbed into our 
blood the sap of the Slav soil, the Slav landscape is re- 
flected in our thought and imagination. We shall fight 
against the system of Government which refuses to recognize 
our equality, as we fought against it in 1905. But the Rus- 
sian soil is sacred, it belongs to the peoples of Russia, and 
whoever dares to touch it will find in the Jew his first foe!" 

VI 

POLES VERSUS JEWS, RUSSIA INTERVENING 

In 191 2 the leading organ of the Warsaw Jewry con- 
sulted me on a burning question of internal politics on which, 
it was said, the fate of the Jews of Poland hung. The 
Poles had put up for the Duma an anti-Semitic candidate 
and threatened pogroms if the Jews of Warsaw, whose 
numbers controlled the election, did not vote for him. 
While deprecating responsibility and pointing out that 
no outsider could gauge the factors, I yet could not but 



39° THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

add my voice to those that declared a vote against them- 
selves to be too degrading. The Jews chose the manlier 
course. True, they still voted for a Pole, they did not 
put forward a Jew, but at least they threw out the avowed 
Jew-hater. The threatened results followed. The first 
stroke was the establishment of a ruthless boycott, which 
soon ruined thousands of Jewish artisans, dealers, shop- 
keepers. No Polish doctor would treat a Jew, no chemist 
make up a prescription. Nor did murderous riots fail; 
but here Russia intervened — to keep down Polish national- 
ism! Into this embittered atmosphere broke the war. 

When the Grand Duke published his historic promise 
of autonomy for Poland, the Jews rejoiced equally with 
the Poles. But the Poles were not to be pacified. "There 
is but one thing that Russia expects of you," the Grand 
Duke had warned them; "that you respect the rights of 
those nationalities with which history has bound you." 
This statesmanlike proviso fell on deaf ears — the Poles 
on the verge of their own freedom were busy devising how 
to oppress another race, complaining that it adulterated 
their nationality, and wildly proposing its emigration 
en masse to America. One paper actually published a 
picture of Jews killing a Christian child for its blood for 
Passover cake — "a practice exposed in the Beilis case." 
But no Polish intellectual has come forward to rebuke 
the mob on behalf of the Jews, though the Russian intel- 
ligentsia is solid for them. "Freedom shrieked when Kos- 
ciuszko fell," but it is the race of Kosciuszko that now 
looms as the foe of freedom. 

A most instructive document has come into my hands, 
drawn up by the Polish committee in Paris which was 
deputed by the French Government to certify the Polish 
nationality of individuals claiming to remain in Paris. 
For at the expulsion of alien enemies, it had been decided 



THE WAR AND THE JEWS 391 

to exempt those races, such as Alsatians, Czechs and Poles, 
that were only German or Austrian subjects by force of 
compulsion. Now the Poles of Paris had long suffered 
from the grievance that the Prefecture of Police refused 
to recognize them as a separate nationality, classifying 
them as Germans, Austrians or Russians, according to 
the particular slice of Poland they hailed from. No sooner 
was the Polish nationality re-established, however, than 
this Committee reported against the inclusion of Polish 
Jews in the list of the exempt, and even went out of its 
way to credit the Jews of Russia, Austria, and Germany 
with one and the same nationality — and that a German! 
For is not the dialect of them all Yiddish, and is not Yiddish 
a form of German? 

In Russian Poland "pro- German" was the word against 
the Jews. In Austrian Poland, however, it had to be re- 
placed by " pro-Russian," unless in the portions conquered 
by Russia, when "pro-German" came in useful again. 
In all parts they were, of course, accused of hoarding coin 
and food-supplies, though, according to an Italian paper, 
in Austrian Poland the arch-speculator in corn was no 
other than the Arch-Duke himself. Thus in the midst 
of their own terrible sufferings the Poles, by denouncing 
the Jews, poured oil on the flames of hell. Whenever a 
town taken by one side was retaken by the other, Poles 
hastened to the conqueror to accuse Jews of being Russian 
spies or German agents, as the case might demand. If 
the Jews went out with the civil population to meet the 
incoming invader and to demand peaceful treatment, they 
were liable to be denounced subsequently as traitors; if 
they cowered at home, they were immediately denounced 
as the one inexorable element. The fact that Germany 
had made a rival promise of Polish autonomy exposed all 
Polish inhabitants to cruel cross-currents of temptation, 



39 2 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

and doubtless divided their house still more against itself. 
It is a profound lesson for statesmen that the only section 
of Poland that was satisfied, and that both offers of au- 
tonomy left cold, was Galicia, for Austrian Poland had its 
constitutional rights, and was free to live its own life. 

It is natural to assume, therefore, that some Jews on the 
Russian borders of Galicia may have gravitated towards 
Austria in the hope of escaping the Russian yoke. We 
know indeed, that, at Kielce the Poles themselves danced 
the streets at the prospect of being rid of Russia. But that 
the Jews played everywhere a double part is a pure fantasy 
of Polish hate. Military law is not far removed from lynch 
law, yet Jews were acquitted of these charges even by 
courts-martial. In Samosz after five Jews had been hanged, 
a Russian pope came forward and unmasked the Polish 
plot, showing that it was the denouncers themselves who 
had trafficked with the Austrians. At Krasnik the Rabbi 
was so sure of the innocence of his flock that he offered 
his own neck to the noose instead — and the offer was ac- 
cepted ! 

Orloff, the Chairman of the Real Russians of Moscow, 
sent to Poland to investigate, reported that the Jews were 
more loyal than the Poles, — a report which cost his expul- 
sion from the party. Even Stephen Graham, who has 
become the mouthpiece of Darkest Russia, gives the Jew 
a certificate of loyalty. They were further accused of 
poisoning the wells, an accusation last made against them 
in these regions in 1364, when Casimir the Great gave 
the Jews of Kalicz a charter of protection against such 
charges. 

One must not suppose, however, that the Poles were 
always conscious perjurers — even in England we know 
how war sets up a very madness of denunciation — an 
epidemic of espionitis. Did not the Home Secretary report 



THE WAR AND THE JEWS 393 

to Parliament that he had investigated a hundred thousand 
accusations without finding a single spy? Imagine the 
state of mind in a country of peasants already saturated 
with Jew-hate. Even Jews saying their prayers were 
supposed to be communicating with the enemy by wireless 
telephony. And the Russians who at the bidding of the 
Poles executed rough-and-ready injustice were not wilful 
persecutors. Indeed, no small part of the blame must be 
placed on the German newspapers, which boasted that the 
Russian Jews were their allies. A Russian Army Order 
now before me quotes these papers and enjoins that Jewish 
hostages shall always be taken, "to assure the army from 
the bad influence of the Jewish population." We need 
look no further for the origin of the 215 pogroms reported 
from Poland. 

Whether all these pogroms really took place, and how 
many of the gruesome details are true, cannot be estab- 
lished at present. Russia — after her financial confabula- 
tion with the British Treasury — denied that any were 
authentic. Austria and Germany through equally official 
channels maintain that the reality is even worse. As for 
the Press, Bismarck's discovery that it can be manipulated 
is now common property. The newspapers, instead of 
increasing information, only thicken the fog. Perhaps it 
is the character of hell to have "No light, but rather dark- 
ness visible." In Milton's hell this served only to " dis- 
cover fights of woe," and in Poland there is sufficient il- 
lumination to show us spectacles best left dark. 

It is significant that the Jewish Deputy's answer in the 
Duma to Sazonoff's denial of outrages was suppressed in 
the Russian papers. But, entirely discounting German 
sources, there are before me too many letters from natives 
of those hapless regions, too many indictments from neu- 
trals like Brandes, too many cries of horror from Russians 



394 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

like Prince Paul Dolgorukoff, and, above all, too many 
unconscious admissions in the Russian and Polish press, 
to leave any hope that this dolorous chapter of Jewish 
history is only a pro-German figment of the pogrom at 
Josef ow. I even possess the names of 81 victims. Poland 
has been full of "Jews in great numbers, wandering about, 
lost, shot at, accused of being spies, arrested, liable to exe- 
cution." (The description is Stephen Graham's.) A Russian 
journalist gives us a vivid picture of these hegiras — trains 
packed from floor to roof with half-dressed people, or great 
processions of men, women and children, trudging for days 
the wintry roads to Warsaw, their toes peeping out of their 
boots, a woe-begone mass of bundles and babies, jeered at by 
the Polish villagers. Fifty have been buried at Warsaw in 
a single day in a melancholy national procession. And 
from every quarter these streams of misery have flowed into 
Warsaw, till the floor of every synagogue and Jewish build- 
ing was packed with sleeping populations. 

The last hours of the great Yiddish novelist, Perez, were 
spent in receiving myriads of the simple folk whose lives 
and naive faith he has so wonderfully described: a cart 
at the head of each congregation carried its Scrolls of the 
Law, and often its violated virgins — "equally sacred," 
said the Poet. 

VII 
Russia against Russia 

Neither of the two great Jewish issues — the abolition of 
the Pale in Russia, 1 and the return to Palestine — can fail 
to be profoundly affected by the war. 

1 A fortnight after the outbreak of the war (August 18, 1914), I addressed 
to the Times a letter upon this point: 

"The rumor reported in your issue of to-day that the Tsar is about to 
give civil and political rights to his Jews will, if confirmed, do much to re- 
lieve the feelings of those who, like myself, believe that the Entente with 
Russia was too high a price to pay even for safety against the German peril. 



THE WAR AND THE JEWS 395 

To follow the movement of opinion in Russia on the Jew- 
ish question has been like watching the swaying of the 
battle-line in Flanders. It is clear that the good and evil 
spirits, that Ormuzd and Ahriman, are at tug of war. And 
the vacillations are reflected in the utterances of Russian 
politicians. Professor Milyukof , the Liberal leader, who at 
the outset of the war saw freedom coming to the Jews, 
now sees it hopelessly receding. A hundred circumstances 

Not that the Russians are not a fine people; it is only with the Russian 
Government that civilization has a quarrel, and the quarrel is as much on 
behalf of her Russian as her Jewish subjects. The offer of autonomy to 
Poland — even if it is only a good stroke of business — shows that that Govern- 
ment is entering upon an era of greater intelligence, and learning at last 
from her British ally that minorities and dependencies are attached more 
closely by love than by fear. The emancipation of the Russian Jews would 
be felt as an immense relief in many countries, not only among Jews, who 
have felt bitterly that the old land of freedom was helping involuntarily to 
perpetuate the Pale, but among Christians also, for all civilization suffers 
under this medieval survival with its sequelae in massacre and emigration. 
In Russia there is a colossal field — half of Europe and half of Asia — for the 
energies of the six million Jews now cooped up in a province of which they 
are forbidden even the villages. 

"Their enfranchisement would, indeed, be a logical consequence of the 
redemption of Poland, for how could Russia permit the Jews in her Polish 
dominion to be freer than in Russia proper? But there is no logic in Russia, 
and it is, alas! far from improbable that the Poles, now engaged in a bar- 
barous boycott of their Jews, would be stupid enough to imitate Russia 
and deny them equality. In that case the Jews now in Austrian and German 
Poland would lose their hard-won rights just as the Jews of Khiva and Bok- 
hara lost theirs when these regions were assigned to Russia. And Russian 
Jews would only assuredly count as human beings if Russia, instead of con- 
quering German and Austrian Poland, herself loses to Germany her German- 
speaking provinces. In these — and they include the bulk of the Jewish 
Pale — the Jews would be seized at a stroke of the rights they have so long 
vainly demanded from Russia. Is it not tragic that in this instance civiliza- 
tion should have more to gain from German militarism than from our 
Eastern ally? I hope that in the final issue of this cosmic cataclysm England 
will not be found the catspaw of Powers opposed to her noblest traditions, 
but that by her insistence on justice and freedom all round she will retro- 
spectively justify her Entente, show a glorious profit on her outlay in arma- 
ments, resume her moral hegemony of the world, and her old place in the 
affections of mankind." 



396 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

justify either view. On the one hand, the passionate fidelity 
of the Jew is seen to touch the Russian heart; on the other 
hand, the forces of reaction still lurk, and are intensified by 
the chauvinism engendered by war. One day we hear that 
the diabolical education system is to be swept away, the 
next the Black Hundreds who were ready to embrace the 
Jews are demanding that in conquered Galicia the Austrian 
Jews should be hampered by the same educational restric- 
tions as in Russia proper, and that even their lands should 
be confiscated — and this though the shrewder Germany 
has been introducing equal rights for the Jews in the 
parts of Poland just conquered by her! One day the 
very dock laborers of Nicolayeff send a thousand roubles 
to help the Polish Jews, the next the Tsar assents to the new 
Local Government Bill for Poland, forbidding Jews to be 
even mayors or town clerks. Now the Jew Katz becomes a 
national hero for keeping back, with only eight men, a whole 
German force, anon the same wounded warrior is expelled 
from a hospital in Petrograd and a section of the Press 
clamors for the exclusion of Jews from the Army. 

But the brain and heart of Russia are sound. It is from 
her own great writer, Andreyev, that has come the touching 
picture of the wounded Jewish soldier slinking into the 
hospital which his companions enter as heroes, and hardly 
daring to groan in the wards for fear of drawing attention 
to the fact that he is outside the Pale. And into this waver- 
ing battle-line of good and evil, of Russia against Russia, 
comes like a cavalry charge the glorious Manifesto of the 
Intellectuals, signed by over two hundred notables, in- 
cluding Senators, members of both Houses, professors, 
academicians, and, above all, the greatest writers of Russia. 
This noble document, which inter alia testifies how abomin- 
ably the anti-Jewish restrictions have been maintained 
even through the war (wives and children, for example, be- 



THE WAR AND THE JEWS 397 

ing unable to visit their husbands and fathers dying in hos- 
pitals for Russia), pays tribute to "the sorely-tried Jewish 
nation which has given to the world many sublime contribu- 
tions in the spheres of religion, philosophy and poetry . . . 
and which is now again submitted to trials and insulted 
by false charges." After recapitulating the Jew's devotion 
to the common cause, it stigmatizes the limitations of 
his rights of citizenship as "not only a crying injustice, 
but also a method damaging to the very interests of the 
state." "Russians," it concludes, "let us bear in mind that 
the Russian Jew has no other fatherland than Russia, and 
that nothing is dearer to a man than the soil on which he 
is born. Let us understand that the welfare and power of 
Russia are inseparably bound up with the welfare and 
liberties of all the nationalities that constitute the whole 
Empire. Let us conceive this truth, let us act in accordance 
with our intelligence and our conscience, and then we are 
sure that the disappearance of all kinds of persecution of 
the Jews and their complete emancipation, so as to be our 
equals in all rights of citizenship, will form one of the con- 
ditions of a really constructive Imperial policy." 

Nor is this inner travail for righteousness, though by far 
the most important force making for Jewish emancipation, 
the only force at work. The assurance I had the privilege 
to receive from Sir Edward Grey, that he would neglect 
no step to encourage it, has been widely published. 1 But 
this does not carry us far, for Russia resents interference in 
her internal affairs. "Russia is not on trial in this war," 
said the Novoye Vremya haughtily, and even Lord Reading 
has reminded us that at the Peace Settlement we shall not 
be making terms with Russia. The real importance be- 

1 To the disgust of the Zcmschtchina, the organ of the Black Hundreds, 
which says it is calculated to produce a "coldness" between the two coun- 
tries. 



398 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

longs, therefore, to Sir Edward Grey's further assurance 
to me that at the end of the war no transferred population 
shall be deprived of its status. Hence should Russia conquer 
any portion of Galicia she will have to leave the Jews their 
pre-existing equal rights, and these rights will then be- 
come the leverage for raising the Jewish status throughout 
the rest of Russia. For it is impossible that Russia will 
be able to allow her new subjects an equality which she 
refuses to the old. 

In any event, and whatever the result of the war, irre- 
sistible economic considerations in favor of Jewish eman- 
cipation are working with the higher forces. It has at last 
been perceived by Russians that the Jews are necessary to 
Russia, that without them she cannot go forward on the 
new path of industrial and commercial development, and 
that if she is not to be exploited by the all-penetrating 
Germans, she must be taken in hand by her own subjects. 
To capture German trade the Pale of Jewish settlement 
must be abolished. And from every Christian quarter, 
from towns and conferences, from the Imperial Economic 
Council of Petrograd itself, come petitions for its abolition. 
The loyal response of the Jews to the recent call for the 
mobilization of trade and commerce has made the need of 
them even plainer. And the very hatred of the Poles for 
the Jews is curiously working in the same direction. For 
the Poles allege that it is not so much their own old-estab- 
lished Jews they object to as the immigrants who pour in 
from Russia, Russianizing everything, and undermining 
Polish nationality, and the Poles have gone so far as to pre- 
vent the native Jews co-operating with Jews from Russia 
proper even upon war-relief committees. And this unwel- 
come westward stream of immigration they trace to the 
economic effects of the existence of the Pale. Were this 
only abolished, the Jew would expand eastwards over 



THE WAR AND THE JEWS 399 

Russia, not come pushing into Poland; nay, the Jews 
already in Poland would begin to migrate into the new 
territory opened up to the Jew. And now that Poland has 
been warned by Brandes, Luzzatti, Andreyev, and other 
makers of European opinion, that at the peace congress her 
own autonomy will not be accorded her if she demes equality 
to her minorities, she is beginning to declare that a modus 
vivendi with the Jews must be found, and it is certain that 
in this compromise she will demand equal rights for the 
Jews throughout the rest of Russia; lest otherwise they 
stream towards her more liberal soil. 

And not only are these forces of hate working for Jewish 
emancipation, but, under "the Divinity that shapes our 
ends, rough-hew them how we will," these forces are even 
making for the rise of a Jewish land. The idea of Palestine 
or some other territory for the Jew is at last in the air. An 
influential Russian paper, the Russkoe Slovo, has started a 
symposium on the subject. Even Tsar Nicholas, according 
to the Novoye Vremya, favored Palestine, while a con- 
temporary Russian statesman would accept a British 
Protectorate over Syria. According to the Novaya Gazeta, 
it is East Africa or some German colony that is to be 
assigned to the Jews. In Italy the Palestine ideal is com- 
bining the Jews under Luzzatti with the Catholics under 
Tonnallo. Gustave Herve preaches it in France, and the 
Labor Parties of the world, which are already solid for 
Jewish emancipation, would not oppose this supplementary 
measure. Even in the British Cabinet powerful elements 
favor the claims of the Jews upon Palestine. Lovers of the 
"prophecies" have always pinned their faith to Armaged- 
don. The return of the Jews to Palestine was always to be 
the immediate sequel of the great world-war. Let us turn, 
therefore, to see how the situation is shaping in the Holy 
Land. 



400 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

The Orient is pre-eminently the region of rumor and 
fantasy, and the reports that have penetrated to us from 
the bazaars of Palestine or been carried by a myriad ref- 
ugees are more contradictory even than the war reports 
of Europe. The Zionist bank has been officially closed 
and officially forced to open. Locusts have eaten the har- 
vest, and it will be more abundant than ever. In part 
these contradictions merely mirror the ever-changing policy 
of the Porte. We may distinguish three stages, the first 
before Turkey had joined in the war, the second when she 
behaved according to Turkish notions, and the third and 
still ruling phase in which Germany stepped in to undo the 
harm to the general cause done by Turkey 's own methods. 
To the first phase belongs the economic damage to Pales- 
tine wrought by the general European situation, for the 
trade of Palestine depends almost entirely on the dis- 
tant world — and ships were few. The great majority 
of the Jews in particular live on sums sent from Europe, 
and the mails had practically ceased to run. To the second 
phase belong the seizure of food-supplies and munitions 
of war * the Ottomanization or expulsion of the Palestine 
Jews, their enrolment in the army, unless they paid the 
necessary baksheesh, the attempt to uproot Zionism, destroy 
the Jewish colonies, and settle Circassians on the Jewish 
land. To the third, or German-American phase, belong 
better economic conditions, the more favorable treatment 
of the Jews, and the explanation that only Zionism with 
its stamps, flags, and symbols, was and is to be the object 

1 We have a vivid account of the situation in Jerusalem from Miss Anne 
Landau, the Head-Mistress of the Evelina de Rothschild School, who was 
chivalrously treated by Djemal Pasha. "The colonists had to give up 
their horses/their carts, their oxen and cows, their laborers and — sorest wound 
perhaps of all — their irrigation pipes which conduct the water to the orange 
groves. In Jerusalem every cab-horse was taken and all enemy property 
confiscated . . . very soon Palestine was like a corked up bottle." 



THE WAR AND THE JEWS 401 

of attack; also the foregathering of Arabs and Jews in 
Jerusalem. 1 There is still,. however, a policy of ruthlessness, 
so far as French or English property is concerned, and 
unfortunately the bulk of the Jewish colonies belong to 
Baron Edmond de Rothschild, of Paris, or to the lea, an 
association which controls the legacy of Baron de Hirsch. 

Help from the United States 

It has been a blessing for the Jews of Palestine that, 
through all this time of turmoil, the United States have 
been represented at the Sublime Porte by Mr. Morgenthau, 
who combines the humanitarianism of the American with 
the special solicitude of the Jew. When Mr. Morgenthau 
passed through London, on his way to his post, he was a 
prey to modest shrinking; had he known he would have to 
represent half the world in war-time he would probably 
have drawn back. Yet no veteran diplomatist could have 
done better. It is owing to him that speedy help for Pales- 
tine was forthcoming from the Jews of the United States, 
and it was his son-in-law, Mr. Maurice Wertheim, who 
carried the gold on an American battleship, supervised its 
distribution on scientific principles, and supplied history 
with the one reliable account of the situation. By gracious 
direction of the Secretary of the Navy, Mr. Josephus 
Daniels, a further supply of food was sent on the U. S. 
colliei, Vulcan, while the U. S. cruiser, Tennessee, trans- 
ported thousands of refugees gratuitously from Jaffa to 
Alexandria. 2 For expulsion was the fate of all Jews who 

1 The Jaffa Hebrew weekly, Hapoel Hazair, states that Djemal Pasha has 
barricaded the Wailing Wall. Thus is the Jew denied access to the last 
fragment of his ancient glories. 

2 These war-ships coming for a despised race greatly put up the Jewish 
status among the Turks. Jews are also indebted to President Wilson for 
claiming a "Jewish day" for collections for the distressed Jews in the war- 



402 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

would not take on Ottoman nationality (at a fee), and it 
would appear that only the Jews of Galilee consented to 
any extent to become Turks, the Jews of Judea preferring 
exile. 1 

But if the cause of Zionism has thus received a serious 
set-back, if the heroic work of the colonists for a whole 
generation seems undone, if the old Jewish exodus from 
Egypt to Palestine has been reversed after three thousand 
years by this great exodus from Palestine to Egypt, the 
new exodus has produced a strange dramatic episode, 
which may bring Zionism nearer than ever to its hope. 
For among the refugees at Alexandria were a number of 
young Zionist colonists, tradesmen and students, wishful 
neither to turn Turk nor to resume the Russian. For the 
suzerain of Palestine they might have been ready to fight, 
had not the Turks declared a "Holy" war, which these 
young Jews felt was as little their business as to fight for 
the Russian they had long since quitted. But Egypt had 
been proclaimed English, and inasmuch as Russian law 
allowed absent subjects to fight in an allied army, they 
would fight with England — for Palestine! 

The idea of fighting for Palestine was not, indeed, new. 
It had more than once been brought to me by the despair- 
ing younger generation. But now it had come in a practi- 
cable form. Through their spokesman, a Russo- Jewish 
journalist, the young Zionists begged to be enlisted as a 
British-Palestine battalion. To the British military mind, 
nursed on the Bible, the idea did not lack fascination, and 

zone — a proclamation unique in history — and for declaring that if he were at 
the Peace Conference he would insist on rights for Russian and Rumanian 
Jews. The British Government also generously allowed money and food to 
reach the Jews of Palestine. 

1 The Turkish Government with delightful informality pressed Mr. Mor- 
genthau to join the Cabinet as Minister of Commerce and Agriculture. He 
could still go on being American Ambassador, they said! 



THE WAR AND THE JEWS 403 

General Maxwell, the Grand Commander of Egypt, ap- 
pointed Colonel J. H. Patterson, the distinguished Irish sol- 
dier and sportsman, to organize the corps. The Colonel 
cabled to me, asking for a message of encouragement, and I 
cabled back my welcome of the incident as an omen for the 
establishment of a British Protectorate in Palestine. This 
message, toned down by the local military censorship into 
a wish for the men's "happy return" to Palestine, was 
read to them, and the Colonel made a speech that was 
translated into Hebrew, and ended with the words: "Pray 
with me that I should not only, as Moses, behold Canaan 
from afar, but be divinely permitted to lead you into the 
Promised Land." The troops were then solemnly sworn 
in by the Chief Rabbi of Alexandria, who gave a stirring 
address, and then, with "Hedads" for King George, the 
Colonel, and the cabler, the young Zionists, five hundred 
strong, marched off singing their national hymn. Hur- 
riedly equipped, mainly with Turkish rifles, and wearing a 
small brass disc with the "Shield of David" over their 
black Turkish greatcoats — or a red shield instead of a 
cross fo' the Medical Corps — they pitched their tents in 
the old Biblical fashion, and the word of command rang 
through the air in Hebrew. 

After only six weeks' training they, with their thousand 
mules, were transferred to the Dardanelles as the "Zion 
Mule Transport Corps," whose perilous function is to 
bring ammunition and stores up to the trenches. Already 
they have been publicly thanked by the General, while two, 
for gallantry in operations near Krithia, received the D. 

C. M. But, as one of the wounded said, "Proud as I 
am of my wound, I should be the happiest man alive 
had I received it on the soil of Palestine." * The origi- 

1 For further details see With the Zionists in Gallipoli by Colonel Patterson, 

D. S. O. He says, "The troops in Gallipoli always said: 'Let us have the 



404 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

nal negotiator of the corps has come to me in England 
on a mission of gathering the recruits in every avail- 
able country. Thus after a gap of 1,782 years, and as if 
symbolically at the very moment when the Turks have 
prohibited the immemorial prayer at the Wailing Wall, 
there is again a Jewish army, however humble. And this 
army is in alliance with the British. Palestine alone cannot 
solve the Jewish problem, and "equal rights everywhere" 
remains an imperative necessity. But only Jewish nation- 
alism can ever write a new chapter of Josephus. "They 
may hang us, violate our women, drag us through the seven 
hells, " wrote some Russo- Jewish volunteers from the French 
trenches, enclosing their pitifully few francs for Jewish 
relief funds, "but we will remain Jews." 

Zion men.'" British Officers used to write and say that they had never met 
such gallant fellows. They were in fact quite fearless. One of the Jewish 
Officers was Captain Trumpledor who had already been decorated by the 
Tsar with the cross of St. George in gold for special gallantry. There were 
nine killed and sixty wounded. 



"RUSSIA AND THE JEWS " 

Two Letters to The Nation 



Sir, — Is no organ safe from Mr. Stephen Graham? In 
his self-appointed role of defender of Holy Russia, that 
voluminous young writer displays a vigilance and an in- 
dustry positively German, and an efficiency no less Teu- 
tonic in its disregard of established standards. His latest 
exploit is an attempt to capture The Nation. But those 
of your readers who may be impressed by the plausible 
tone of his letter in your last issue may be recommended 
to turn to his article under the same title in the current 
number of the English Review. Throughout that article, 
Mr. Graham is incredibly engaged in fanning the almost 
extinct embers of the Blood Accusation. He actually 
writes — in language which even the Russian Censor would 
hardly permit — "Beiliss was innocent — though he was 
actually involved in the murder. Someone was guilty, a 
madman or a Jew, and, indeed, the probability is that a 
Jew actually committed the crime. Whether it was for 
ritual purposes or not is another matter." The Beiliss 
case reopened, you see, the whole monstrous medieval 
myth, still treated as a live possibility. Indeed, Mr. Gra- 
ham's whole article reads like an expansion of the dialogue 
which I put into the mouth of the Jew-baiting Russian 
Baron in The Melting Pot. It is literary mine-sowing, 
and in a friendly area, for 350,000 Russian Jews are now 
fighting for their fatherland. 

40s 



406 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

As for his contribution to your own columns, his cool 
assertion that "no harm has been done to the Jews during 
this war" — coming as it does at a moment when the Polish 
Jews are living through one of the greatest tragedies in 
history — almost freezes my ink. One must set aside, of 
course, what the Jews have suffered in common with their 
fellow -Russians, but the tale of their special miseries is so 
superfluously tragic that it has brought numerous protests 
from Russian newspapers and Russian parties. Thus al- 
ready in the Russkiya Vedomosti of November 3rd, Prince 
Paul Dolgorukoff denounced that pitiless interpretation 
of the laws of the Pale by which the Jewish soldier's nearest 
and dearest cannot visit his death-bed if the hospital lies 
outside the prescribed region, or which, after the amputa- 
tion of a leg, hounds him out of the prohibited area as soon 
as he can hobble. Is it for the purity of her Christianity 
that Mr. Graham has become the apostle of Russia? Well, 
her Christian chivalry to her Jewish lieges — and many a 
Russian Jew has rallied to her colors who was safely outside 
Russia — may be gauged by the instances collected by Mr. 
George Kennan in the American Outlook for January 27 th. 
Mr. Kennan has been accused of creating the "Rus- 
sia of the novelists." He has, therefore, wisely confined 
himself to bald extracts from Russia's own press, such as 
reports of wounded Jewish soldiers being excluded even 
from hospitals. 

Moreover, Mr. Graham cannot have forgotten the recent 
historic indictment of Poland by Brandes, his detailed state- 
ment of war pogroms, such as that at Josefow, where, under 
that other medieval suspicion of "poisoning the wells," 
seventy-eight Jews were killed, many women violated, 
and houses and shops looted. It is this indictment which 
has transformed Brandes from the idol of Poland to a dog 
of a Jew. For one of the first feats of the great humanist 



RUSSIA AND THE JEWS 407 

was to expend on the literature and romance of Poland all 
the enthusiasm he could spare from neglecting the romance 
and literature of his native Jewry. Now, a generation 
later — disillusioned over the Poles who, in the very height 
of their struggle for freedom, are seeking to crush or uproot 
the Jews whom they originally invited to settle among 
them — Brandes sorrowfully recalls his youthful rhapsodies. 
"I said, Poland stands as the emblem of all that the greatest 
of mankind have loved and fought for. Am I to feel shame 
for these words now when the destiny of Poland is to be 
fulfilled?" Brandes's generous ardor is still not that of a 
Jew on behalf of the Jews — as Mr. Graham and his tribe 
pretend of all such natural emotions — still less is it "pro- 
German"; it is the old universal passion for freedom and 
justice. 

Mr. Graham, waving aside all these facts with a Pod- 
snappery truly magnificent, observes, with bureaucratic 
toploftiness, almost as himself a member of "the spheres:" 
"The Russian Government is not in the habit of entering 
the journalistic arena to deny libels." Why, this is pre- 
cisely what the Russian Government did when it officially 
denied in the Times of January 22nd the libel fathered on 
M. Sazonoff by Mr. Stephen Graham, that after the 
war nothing would be done for the Jews. It was at M. 
Sazonoff's own house at lunch that, according to Mr. 
Graham, the Russian Foreign Minister made his statement 
to him, and as, in the same number of the English Review, 
Mr. Graham repeats a conversation on the Jewish question 
with the Lord Chief Justice at the dinner-table, I can only 
deplore that a journalist with such a code should be given 
such prominence in the Times, or that a writer with so 
much engaging enthusiasm and literary charm and so 
precious a sense of Russian mysticism and brotherhood, 
a writer who might really help Russia and England to help 



408 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

each other, should have gone so hopelessly astray in the 
dreary bogs of reactionary politics. — Yours, etc., 

Israel Zangwill. 
February 15th, 191 5. 

II 

To the Editor of The Nation 
Sir, — I am very surprised to learn from Mr. Stephen 
Graham that the Lord Chief Justice read his article through 
before publication in the English Review; and I apologize 
to him for assuming he had reproduced Lord Reading's 
dinner-table conversation without permission. He makes 
no attempt, however, to justify that article (still connecting 
Beilis and the Jews with the murder which everybody 
knows was committed by the woman Tcheviriakova), or 
to answer Dr. Brandes's indictment of the Poles, or to 
justify his assertion that "no harm has been done the Jews 
during this war;" and he cannot glide away with some 
graceful compliments to my literary merits. I had already 
regretfully acknowledged his, and the situation is too 
serious for posturings. It really will not do to pretend 
that I am "kicking up a dust" to cover that the Bund 
"had been publishing false news of a pogrom at Lodz, and 
so weakening the strength and unity of the Allies." What 
have I to do with the Bund? Moreover, the Bund did not 
confine its news of pogroms to Lodz, and it added that, 
under pretext of treachery, whole Jewish populations had 
been hounded from their homes. One of these drives was 
even described in the Daily Mail of February 15th. 
Mr. Graham's proof that there was no pogrom at Lodz is 
that nothing appeared about it in the Russian or English 
press! Doubtless the German press is as tainted as either, 
but the charge that 215 pogroms have occurred in Poland 
is most solemnly made by the chaplain of the Jewish forces 



RUSSIA AND THE JEWS " 409 

in Germany, and a number of these are attested from a 
variety of other sources with which I will not weary or 
sicken your readers. The Rabbi adds: "There is no hope 
of seeing an end to these horrors." As for the pogrom in 
Lodz, so far from the news having been false, or nothing 
having appeared in the Russian press, the Nowyj Woschod, 
of Petrograd (November 26 th), said in a paragraph passed 
by the Censor: "The Military Commandant of the town 
of Lodz, who received a Jewish deputation, begged it to tran- 
quillize the population, as those guilty of the pogrom would 
be punished according to military law." In fairness to Mr. 
Graham, it must be admitted it was not a "bad" pogrom, 
though it was renewed several times, and included the ironic 
incident of the wounding of a Jewish soldier by the mob. 
Mr. Graham's suggestion that the Jews are inventing 
slanders against Russia, and thereby weakening the Allies, 
is as unworthy as it is mistaken. At the outbreak of the 
war the English organ, Darkest Russia, ceased publication 
with the dignified remark that the best thing it could now 
contribute was its silence. The chivalrous reply of the 
pro-Russian press was to fill the air with glorifications of 
Russia and vilifications of the Jews under cover of "the 
fog of war," relying on its ability to becloud and menace 
any Jewish critic with the suspicion of anti-Britishism or 
even pro-Germanism. Mr. Graham seems to forget that 
the treason to the cause of the Allies is committed by the 
perpetrators of horrors, not the narrators. The humor of 
the situation is that in defending the cause of the Allies I 
have become a byword in the German press, branded as a 
pro-Russian turn-coat, the butt of lectures, poems, para- 
graphs, and cartoons. It is the same in the pro-German 
press of the States. Let me quote only one sentence from 
an "Open Letter" addressed to me by the notorious Father- 
land of New York. "Your amazing statement that 'it is 



4IO THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

better that the Russian Jews should continue to suffer 
than that the great interests of civilization should be sub- 
merged by the triumph of Prussian militarism' surpasses 
in its cruelty and injustice anything I have ever seen written 
by a Jew." And this although my plea for our Allies was 
enforced by Sir Edward Grey's promise to me to neglect 
no step to encourage equal rights for the Jews in Russia. 
Imagine, then, the effect in America and other neutral 
countries, whose sympathies the British Government has 
desired to retain, of Stephen Graham's fire-brands in the 
Times. It is he, not I or the Bund, that has been playing 
the German game. His fantastic solution of the Polish- 
Jewish problem — exclusion of the Jews from any rights 
under Polish autonomy and their departure in their millions 
to America — appearing as it did in an organ popularly 
supposed to be the very voice of Britain, created a panic 
throughout the Pale, and even agitated America with 
apprehension of a gigantic immigration. As a witty Amer- 
can cartoonist put it, "Russia grants the Jews equal rights 
— in America! " When it is remembered that Germany 
does give the Jews equal rights, and has hastened to give 
them even to the Russian Jews in conquered Lodz, while 
the "Black Hundred" press is urging Russia to take them 
away even from the Austrian Jews in conquered Lemberg, 
it will be understood how the pro-German effect of Stephen 
Graham's Polish propaganda was aggravated when he 
announced that Sazonoff, the Russian Foreign Minister, 
had told him the only alleviation the Russian Jews were 
likely to find after the war was — the deprivation of their 
right to serve in the Army. That is to say, the Jew's reward 
for his heroic patriotism — and eighty Jewish chevaliers of 
St. George have been registered in Moscow alone — is to 
lose his one equal right — that of dying for Russia. It is a 
pity this brilliant idea did not occur to Russia before she 



RUSSIA AND THE JEWS " 411 

had made 50,000 Jewish widows. But if Russia does mean 
to throw over the Jews, the least she could do, out of con- 
sideration for her Allies, is to conceal her intentions. No 
wonder that Sazonoff and the Russian Embassy hastened 
to disavow their indiscreet exponent. 

Mr. Graham replies: "I have never written anywhere 
that M. Sazonoff said that nothing would be done for the 
Jews. " This is mere quibbling, for what he said M. Sazonoff 
offered was even less than nothing. In the Sunday Times 
of January 17th, Mr. Graham reported the conversation: 
'"Is anything likely to be done to relieve the tension of the 
Jewish problem?' 'M. Sazonoff thought it possible that 
they might be excused military service in future if they 
wished it. He recognized the great difficulty of dealing 
with the Jewish problem, but spoke enthusiastically of the 
coming restoration of Poland.' " But the repudiation by 
the Russian Government does not limit itself to what M. 
Sazonoff said. It denies he made any statement whatever. 
(" We are informed that M. Sazonoff has made no statement 
whatsoever concerning the Jewish question in Russia." 
Times, January 22nd.) Yet, in your last issue, Mr. 
Graham asserts: "M. Sazonoff gave me express permission 
to quote his remarks." I must leave them to fight it out 
between themselves. 

But if Russia does mean to do nothing for the Jews, the 
least she could do, out of consideration for her Allies, is to 
conceal her intentions. No wonder that Sazonoff and the 
Russian Embassy hastened to disavow their indiscreet 
exponent. 

So far as the Jews are concerned, the effect of Mr. Gra- 
ham's incessant output of books and articles, his tireless 
discourses in clubs, hotels, halls, and churches, is to prepare 
the world for England's abandonment of the Russian Jews 
at the end of this war of freedom. As the Pall Mall Gazette 



412 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

said, in winding up its eulogy of his new book: "To demand 
rights for Russian Jews upon English or American analo- 
gies is simply to treat with contempt the realities of an 
Empire whose political intelligence and institutions are 
still in embryo." But the Jews are only a side issue. The 
real danger from Mr. Graham's crusade is to Russia and 
to England. He wishes to bring Russia and England to- 
gether. It is the last thing he should do, with his obviously 
sincere desire to save Russia from industrialism. To work 
day and night to introduce Russia to "the nation of shop- 
keepers" is, indeed, a curious way of saving her from de- 
veloping like the West. Also, he wishes us to love Russia. 
But we are already hopelessly united to her, commercially 
and politically, and we all do love Russia — that Russia 
whose soul has been revealed to us by the great writers 
whom she has exiled and imprisoned. How can we not 
welcome her into the great democratic brotherhood of 
England and France, how can we not love the poor moujik 
who, as Mr. Graham tells us, goes off to the "Holy War" 
without even knowing against whom? Why, before Mr. 
Graham was heard of I had anticipated his tender sympathy 
for the Russian pilgrims to Jerusalem, and I placed on the 
stage the teaching of Russia's greatest spirit. I might love 
Russia even more, were a Jew allowed to see her, but even 
the Lord Chief Justice, a savior of the Russian financial situ- 
ation, cannot enter Russia by simple virtue of his British citi- 
zenship. Mr. Graham is trying to make us love the wrong 
Russia — the Russia which he may foist upon Englishmen 
but never upon the Russians. He has had a mystic vision 
a la Pobedonostsev of a Holy Russia, bathed in the light 
that never was on sea or land, and it leads straight not to 
Tolstoy, but to Torquemada. Such a unity of Church 
and State as he holds is impossible, if only because Russia 
has nearly twenty million Mohammedans. Mr. Graham's 



RUSSIA AND THE JEWS 413 

reactionary mysticism would not matter if it stopped at 
Russia, where the bureaucracy has no need of his services. 
But he has become a carrier of political infection to England. 
His new book actually suggests that England should copy 
the Russian constitution — the constitution of the very 
Empire whose primitiveness the Pall Mall acknowledges. 
England is to refuse naturalization to anyone unprovided 
with a baptismal certificate! A pretty proposition for the 
head of the Empire of all creeds and races, which has just 
enlisted them all in its fight for world-freedom! Even 
Russia does not go so far, for her millions of Mussulmans 
are recognized as Russians. 

But Mr. Graham goes yet farther or still more back- 
wards. In attacking Bernard Shaw he speaks of those who 
are "whispering treason against Russia." Russia has then, 
it seems, already annexed the British Empire, and British 
citizens are capable of "treason" against her. Did I not 
warn Mr. Wells in your columns that the "Liberal fear of 
Russia" was not of her enmity? 

It shows to what intellectual poverty we are come that 
the subjective visions and poetic snapshots of our new 
Sentimental Journeyer should be hailed as heaven-sent 
statesmanship. "No book could be better timed," says the 
Observer. Well-timed, indeed. To the British conscience, 
uneasy about Russia, Mr. Graham comes as a providential 
pacifier, a soothing syrup. Populus vult decipi et decipitur. 
Not that he is a wilful deceiver. As I told him when I first 
came under the fascination of his style and personality, he 
is a poet walking in a powder factory. Smoking the "en- 
chanted cigarettes" whose cloud-rings hide from him the 
real Russia, he does not realize that he is dropping lighted 
matches in the most explosive area of Europe. — Yours, etc., 

Israel Zangwill. 

March, 1915. 



THEODOR HERZL 

Farewell, O Prince, farewell, O sorely-tried! 
You dreamed a dream and you have paid the cost: 
To save a people leaders must be lost, 
By friends and foes alike be crucified. 

Yet 'tis your body only that has died. 
The noblest soul in Judah is not dust 
But fire that works in every vein — -and must 
Re-shape our life, re-kindling Israel's pride. 

So we behold the captain of our strife: 
Triumphant in this moment of eclipse; 
Death has but fixed him in immortal life. 

His flag upheld, the trumpet at his lips. 

And while we, weeping, rend our garment's hem, 

"Next year," we cry, "Next year, Jerusalem." 

Israel Zangwill. 
July 4th, 1904. 



414 



THE JEWISH FACTOR IN THE WAR AND THE 
SETTLEMENT 

[A paper read before the Fabian Society on Dec. 10, 191 5. This 
paper naturally overlaps the preceding article at a few points, but 
carries the story later.] 



I feel honored by the request of the Fabian Society to 
contribute a paper on "The Jewish Factor in the War and 
the Settlement," yet it is scarcely possible to treat this 
subject as straightforwardly as doubtless other factors 
have been treated by your lecturers. For while these other 
factors are plain and palpable, the Jews — I have ventured 
to assert — do not exist: as a political entity, that is. Nor is 
this a paradox of my own. You will find it in the Times' 
Atlas. An intelligent Icelander or Somali, studying a 
stranded copy of it, would never discover from it that there 
were such folk as Jews in the world. On no map would 
he discover any trace of a territory belonging to them, 
while even from the maps colored according to religion, 
their existence would be equally unsuspected. Indeed, the 
only religious division in which they could possibly find 
place would be the fight-orange departments allotted to 
"the heathen." 

I am well aware of the legend that they not only exist 
but are a federation of millionaires darkly bent on subduing 
the world, or at least on pulling its strings in the Jewish 
interest. But as I happen to have been engaged for some 
fifteen years in trying to focus Jewish forces, if only for 

415 



416 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

self-defence, I am in a position to assure you that this 
legend is funnier than anything in Thackeray's burlesque 
of Disraeli. 

The Jews are a frightened people: sixteen centuries of 
Christian love have broken down their nerves. For the 
persecution which began with Constantine, the founder 
of State Christianity, has known scarcely a lull. If there 
is any object that could federate the Jewish millionaires, 
it would be that of destroying such political Jewish power 
as they still apprehend may survive or be brought into 
existence. And the war has come to co-operate with them, 
grinding the broken atoms of Jewry still smaller, dashing 
them one against another. Its forces cross and cancel 
one another, and their resultant is not Zion, but zero. 1 

II 

You will now be able to appraise at its true value the 
insinuation at present faint, but fated to gather force and 
frequency as all the swash-bucklers who started the war 
become increasingly sick of it, that the Jewish factor in 
the war is nothing less than the whole responsibility for it; 
that it was an affair of Jewish financiers or wire-pullers 2 or 
perhaps, as one of my anonymous correspondents explains 
to me, a consequence of the vermin-like multiplication of 
the Jews in Germany, which unhappy land having thus no 

1 " Silence, consent and defence of the wrong done, all make those who 
practice them accomplices in the sin which they seek to shroud or excuse." 
(Times, January 13, 1916.) 

2 The Dutch Catholic paper Tijd has actually said that the big Jewish 
bankers had induced the German princes and Diplomatists to go to war to 
acquire still more power when Europe would become helpless. So too the 
Clarion here, while the Times quotes a Viennese saying that the war will 
end when the last Jew becomes a millionaire. In truth it was at the in- 
spiration of an Hungarian Jewess, Rourka Schwimmer, that the Ford Peace 
Ship set out. 



JEWISH FACTOR IN THE WAR AND THE SETTLEMENT 417 

room for its own race was compelled to look for "a place 
in the sun." (The Jews of Germany, I may remark, are 
less than i per cent of the population.) 

You will now be also in a position to appreciate the 
suggestion of the London Times that the Jews are the 
instigators of the Armenian massacres, 1 and although the 
journalists harp on Tsar Ferdinand's nose (as though it 
were a Jew's harp) and a writer in the Fortnightly Review 
dwells with unction on "that somewhat Judaic nose of the 
Kaiser, through which he speaks with a distinctly Judaic 
snuffle," you will not, I imagine, deduce that Jewish Jes- 
uitry has set its scions on the thrones of Bulgaria and Ger- 
many in order to destroy Britain. 

Ill 

The proposition that the Jews do not exist requires, 
however, a slight modification. Though the race has no 
cohesion as a people, yet where it exists in large numbers 
it forms sub-nationalities, and these do constitute political 
entities, sometimes exercising, as in Austria, that hotch- 
potch of races, a certain autonomy. By far the chief of 
these sub-nationalities is the Jewry of Russia, recently 
calculated at six millions, a population larger than that of 
Palestine in the days of Solomon. These Russian Jews 
are half the Jews of the world and almost the whole Jewish 
problem. 

The Jews of England are too few to be regarded as a 
sub-nationality, they are merely a small dissenting sect, 
not indeed reaching half a million in the whole British 
Empire, including South Africa, where a Mark Twain 

1 A member of an American college at Constantinople testifies that the 
voice of Morgenthau, the Jewish ambassador, was the only one raised for 
mercy. " What he has done for this unhappy people, single-handed and 
alone, is almost miraculous." 



418 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

might be forgiven for saying he personally knew two mil- 
lions. Between all these hyphenated sub-nationalities and 
localized sects there is normally as much repulsion as 
attraction, but the latent kinship flames up under the 
persecution of any fraction, and the million Jews of New 
York who are said to be capable of swinging a Presidential 
election and whose attitude toward Russia resembles the 
American-Irish role in the Home Rule struggle, may be 
regarded as a distinct factor in the war, indeed, the only 
Jewish factor; not anti-British, but certainly not pro-ally. 1 

1 To this and other neutral Jewries, I issued the following appeal in the 
early days of the war. 

Although the most monstrous war in human history was "Made in Ger- 
many," and although Germany's behavior in war is as barbarous as her 
temper in peace, I note with regret that a certain section of Jewry in America 
and other neutral countries seems to withhold sympathy from Britain and 
her Allies. In so far as these Jews are German born, their feeling for Ger- 
many is as intelligible as mine for England. But in so far as they are swayed 
by consideration for the interests of the Russian Jews (to whom Germany 
and Austria are offering equal rights) let me tell them that it were better 
for the Jewish minority to continue to suffer, and that I would far sooner lose 
my own rights as an English citizen, than that the great interests of civiliza- 
tion should be submerged by the triumph of Prussian militarism. 

And in saying this I speak not as a British patriot but as a world-patriot, 
dismayed and disgusted by the inhuman ideal of the Gothic Superman. I 
am well aware that Germany's press agents paint Germany as the guardian 
of civilization, an angel fighting desperately against hordes of savages im- 
ported from Africa and Asia. But if we are using black forces it is for a 
white purpose; she is using white forces for a black purpose. 

But is it not even certain that the Jews of Russia will continue to suffer, 
once England is relieved from this Teutonic nightmare? The assurance I 
have been privileged to obtain from Sir Edward Grey, that he will neglect 
no opportunity of encouraging the emancipation of the Russian Jews, marks 
a turning point in their history, replacing as it does windy Russian rumors 
by a solid political basis of hope. Nor is this the mere utterance of a politi- 
cian in a crisis. I am in a position to state that it represents the attitude of 
all that is best in English thought. It is with confidence, therefore, that I 
appeal to American and other "neutral" Jews not to let the shadow of 
Russia alienate their sympathies from the indomitable island which now, 
as not seldom before, is fighting for mankind, and which may yet civilize 
Russia — and Germany! 



JEWISH FACTOR IN THE WAR AND THE SETTLEMENT 419 

Mr. Jacob Schiff, the most powerful Jew in the States, 
refused to touch the war-loan unless with a guarantee — 
which was refused — that no part of the money should go 
to Russia. Though German-born, he was quite willing 
to help England, but as the financier of the Japanese war 
against Russia, he refused to stultify himself. 1 The Jewish 
ideal is of course the antithesis of the Prussian, and it also 
happens that the Jews in the field, beginning with some 
four hundred thousand Russian Jews, are overwhelmingly 
on the side of the allies. 

Yet it would be false to claim them as a pro-ally force, 
for they have merely obeyed local patriotism, slaying one 
another at its bidding, and in Germany they are the brain- 
power behind the Throne. One body, indeed, of Jewish 
soldiers, the Zion Mule Transport Corps — recruited for 
the British army out of the refugees from Palestine, and 
constituting the first Jewish regiment since the year 133, 
does represent an independent choice of sides, for it was 
inspired by faith in England, and the hope that England, 
the historic champion of small peoples, would lead the Jew 
into the Promised Land. But this Jewish contribution — 
valuable as is the service it has rendered at the Dardanelles 
— is too small to rank as a factor in so mighty a war. 



rv 

For centuries England has been the political hope of the 
Jew, indeed, the Holy Land of Europe, the cradle of liberty, 
the fount of salvation. How disconcerting then that in 
this great war, nominally waged moreover for every Jewish 

1 A book Der Welt-Krieg und die Juden (B. Segel, Berlin, 1915) fiercely 
attacks me for pro-Russianism, as do many German Papers, Professor Her- 
mann Cohen, the distinguished neo-Kantian has also lectured against me on 
this same amusing ground. 



420 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

ideal, large sections of neutral Jewish opinion should bitterly 
desire the defeat of Britain's ally, and, indeed, by journalis- 
tic and other imponderable influences tend to its downfall. 
To understand how this hatred for Russia could overcome 
even their love and reverence for Britain, and their loathing 
for Prussian militarism to whose dangers I have tried to 
arouse them, we must remember not merely the pogroms, 
but what Mr. Lucien Wolf has called, in the title of his 
invaluable compilation, "The Legal Sufferings of the Jews 
in Russia." 

At the outbreak of the war the Russian Jews found them- 
selves — with a few privileged exceptions — incarcerated in a 
pale whose very villages were prohibited to them, debarred 
from most offices of dignity in state or army, and disallowed 
higher education except for a minute percentage of the 
candidates, chosen — with a last touch of diabolical inge- 
nuity — not for their intellectual promise but by lot. In 
191 3, of 3,908 Jewish students who applied for admission 
to the universities and technical colleges, 162 were admitted. 
It was the intellectual starvation of a whole people. Pro- 
fessor Dicey, in an introduction to Mr. Wolf's book, wrote: 
"The worst evil of Russian despotism is that it threatens 
the Jewish subjects of the Tsar with moral degradation. 
. . . The strange discussion of the horrible question whether 
baptism shall save a Jew from the disabilities to which he 
is subject tells its own tale. . . . The persecution of Rus- 
sian Jews is not a matter which affects Russia alone. . . . 
It is assuredly the concern of every civilized State that the 
slow and laborious progress of mankind should suffer no 
retrogression." 

When Professor Dicey wrote this in 191 2, England was 
not bound to protest merely as a civilized State. She was 
bound to protest as a State in semi-alliance with Russia. 
But Sir Edward Grey interpreted otherwise the great tradi- 



JEWISH FACTOR IN THE WAR AND THE SETTLEMENT 42 1 

tion in his keeping. "I cannot interfere in the internal 
affairs of Russia." That became his formula and he did 
not budge from it, even when he was shown how Russia 
put a slur on British citizenship by refusing British-born 
Jews the right to enter Russia. America on this very 
ground broke off her commercial treaty with Russia, but 
England dared not claim for her Lord Chief Justice and 
her Home Secretary those rights to British protection 
against injustice and wrong, in whatever land they might 
be, which Palmerston vindicated even for the Portuguese 
Jew of Gibraltar, robbed by a mob at Athens. 

And when the Entente was changed into an Alliance, 
and England's responsibility for Russia proportionately 
increased, Sir Edward Grey still clung to his formula, 
though Russia's internal affairs had clearly become Eng- 
land's internal affairs, involving her and her fortunes in 
the odium they excited. In vain, while urging upon the 
Jews of neutral lands that the issue was wider than the 
rights or wrongs of the Russian Jews, I urged our Govern- 
ment to press upon the Tsar the necessity for their instant 
emancipation, a measure the easier and the more natural, 
inasmuch as they had come into the war with burning 
enthusiasm, inexhaustible sacrifices, and incredible heroism. 
Their emancipation would have meant to the Allied cause 
an immense asset of good will — the good will of a people 
of journalists. 

But the opportunity was let slip, though it was a war 
for righteousness and the freedom of small nationalities, 
and though even a Russian Senator — Baron Rosen, formerly 
Ambassador at Washington — cried out in the Imperial 
Council: "It is impossible simultaneously to serve two 
gods — it is impossible to profess as regards international 
relations the great principles of liberty and justice and to 
ignore them as regards inner affairs. This would be un- 



422 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

paralleled political hypocrisy and cynicism." But was 
there at least an alleviation — for war time only — of "the 
legal sufferings of the Jews of Russia?" Surely Russia 
was touched by their Jewish patriotism. They were the 
sole nationality from which only-sons were conscripted 
and they bore it without a murmur; they even added volun- 
teers — they came back from America itself. Their wealthier 
classes poured out funds, they organized hospitals. Surely 
Russia — the land, as Stephen Graham tells us, of pure 
primitive Christianity — could not but respond to this 
supreme example of Christian forgiveness! 

How Russia responded you shall now hear. And though 
a stream of documents has poured upon me from Russian 
Jewry, it is not their evidence that I shall call, though it 
is naturally nearest to the facts. I will go only to the 
speeches in the Duma, published in the Russian papers, 
neither censored by the Russian Government, nor con- 
tradicted by it: 

V 

"Under the mask of military requirement," said Professor 
Milyukoff , the celebrated leader of the Cadet Party (Consti- 
tutional Democrats), "unheard-of measures of corporate 
responsibility for uncommitted crimes were adopted against 
the Jews — measures reminding one of the savage laws of 
the Dark Ages, and degrading us in the eyes of the civilized 
world." "The Jews," said A. F. Kerenski (Labor party), 
"have been crucified by hatred and calumny." "A series 
of measures," cried Friedman (the Jewish Deputy), "ab- 
solutely incredible and unheard of in the history of hu- 
manity, whether for their cruelty or their pretext." 

What was this pretext? Let Tschkheidze, the leader 
of the Socialist Democrats, answer — and answer it. "Gen- 
tlemen," he said in the Duma on the 16th of August, 1915, 



JEWISH FACTOR IN THE WAR AND THE SETTLEMENT 423 

"the Government, once more on its last legs, turns again 
for a scapegoat to the Jews. This time instead of a charge 
of ritual murder, it is the accusation of felony and treachery. 
But all Russia and all Europe know what has happened 
behind the armies and on the battlefields. The guilty are 
not the Jews — the whole country knows that. The guilty 
are the traitors — some of them recently in high office, some 
of them now hanged — who have battened on official con- 
tracts." * . 

And what were the measures to repress the innocent 
Jews? One was, like the Germans in Belgium — to take 
hostages, but, unlike the Germans, from their own subjects. 
Four hundred of the Jewish elders were thrown into prison — 
the punishment, as a Christian critic put it in the Duma, 
of enjoying public respect. But the main measure, as 
transpires from all the Duma speeches, consisted or con- 
sists — for it has not yet quite ceased — in driving out whole 
populations at a few hours' notice from their homes and 
possessions; in turning some six hundred thousand Jews 
into vagabonds and mendicants. The sick, including 
women in child-birth and cases of contagious disease, were 
dragged from their beds, the orphans from the asylums, 
the lunatics from the madhouses, and such as could be 
packed in any goods trucks available were sent off without 
food or water with letters of consignment like goods; the 
others, men, women and children, had to go afoot through 
the wintry roads. 

If a baby died on the way, the parents could not stop 
to bury it; if the scarlatina or typhus patients died in the 
train, the bodies were not removed. Dzioubinski, the 

1 These were named by the Chairman of the Army and Navy Commis- 
sion in the Duma on March 21st, and included Sukhomlinov, the former 
War Minister, and General Grogoryev, who surrendered the fortress of 
Kovno. 



424 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

peasant deputy, told the Duma of an evacuation of Jews 
which he had himself witnessed in the Government of 
Radom. "At eleven o'clock at night," so ran his descrip- 
tion, "the whole Jewish population was suddenly exiled. 
Whoever was found at daybreak would be hanged. In 
the darkness of the night began the exodus to the nearest 
city, thirty versts (that is twenty miles) distant. There 
was no means of transport. The old, the sick, the paralytic, 
were carried by the others." 

A letter was read in the Duma from a young American 
Jew who had emigrated from Russia ten years before at 
the age of eighteen, leaving his folks still there. When war 
broke out he risked his life in returning to Russia via Ar- 
changel to enlist, because, he wrote, "I love the land of 
my birth more than my life, more than the liberty I enjoyed 
in America. ... In the Carpathians I lost my right arm, 
almost up to the shoulder, and was invalided home. On 
my way I met, quite by chance, at a railway station my 
mother and my family, expelled from our native place. 
This tragedy broke me up again, and I am now in the mili- 
tary hospital of Riga. . . . Tell the gentlemen of the Right," 
he wound up, "that I do not regret the arm I have lost. 
What I regret is the human dignity I enjoyed on the foreign 
soil of America." 

"Gentlemen," cried the Leader of the Social Democrats, 
in a burst of irrepressible indignation, "it is now a year 
that we are being told that this shambles, this ocean of 
blood, is in the name of law, truth and justice, in the name 
of the highest principles of freedom, equality and fraternity. 
If so, let me ask the government a few questions. Under 
what law is a whole people made to answer for the crimes — 
let us assume they are the heaviest crimes — of some of its 
members? What kind of truth is it when lying communica- 
tions are being fabricated and published in the official 



JEWISH FACTOR IN THE WAR AND THE SETTLEMENT 425 

organ of the government, that the Jews of Kuzhi have 
betrayed the Russian soldiers to the enemy? Why have 
the various periodical publications been ordered to publish 
this lie under threat of penalties? What justice is this 
that requires that a Jewish volunteer, who has been several 
times in battle, and is now crippled and mutilated, shall 
be expelled within twenty-four hours from places in Russia 
where he was looking for employment? 

"What humanity is this which forbids the offering of 
food to hungry Jewish fugitives immured in sealed wagons 
at the stations? What freedom is this to have the whole 
Jewish press suppressed and destroyed by a single stroke 
of the pen? What fraternity is this when a part of the army 
is incited against the Jewish soldiers who are risking their 
lives in the same trenches side by side with the others? 
The Germans are accused of violating the accepted rules 
of war . . . but, gentlemen, in the name of what code of 
law are orders issued to the Russian Army to drive the 
peaceful Jewish population forward under the fire of the 
enemy's bullets? By virtue of what code are Jewish sub- 
jects of Russia being taken as hostages and thrown into 
prison, in order to subject them to torture and to have 
them shot? The Germans are being branded for not having 
spared Rheims Cathedral. But let me ask you what ethical 
or aesthetic principle underlies the outraging of a Jewish 
woman within the precincts of the synagogue whither she 
had fled in the hope of escaping her terrible fate?" 

Such have been the "legal" sufferings of the Jews in 
Russia in war-time — the mere military measures. I have 
omitted, you will remember, the facts furnished by my 
Jewish informants. I have not repeated a syllable which 
Russia has censored. Nor have I referred to the horrors 
of the actual warfare; the fact that the Jewish Pale was 
the very heart of the war-zone, bombarded and pillaged 



426 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

by both belligerents, taken and re-taken, its miserable in- 
habitants shot and hanged as spies by each side in turn. 
I have not recalled to you the myriads of orphans and 
widows created legitimately on the battlefields. 

A friend of mine, a neutral, relates that in Switzerland 
he met a Jew from Russia who, having seen all these things, 
sits in his room all day long writing appeals to the rulers and 
potentates of the nations, begging them to make an end 
of the sufferings of the Jews. You perceive that he is mad. 

But I should be giving you a false perspective if I failed 
to point out that the Jews, though the worst, are not the 
only victims of the Russian bureaucracy. The opportunity 
of the war was taken — not to fuse all sects and races in the 
glow of their patriotism. On the contrary, every religious 
and racial minority was oppressed in turn. Listen to the 
Moslem Deputy in the Duma. "Wholesale expulsions 
of the male population, violation of the unprotected women 
left behind, ruined and devastated villages, an impoverished, 
hungry, terror-stricken and unprovided for population, 
this is the position, of the Moslems in the Caucasus." 
Listen to the Lithuanian Deputy. "Whole territories, 
with millions of inhabitants are given over to fire and sword. 
The whole population is driven out, the country laid waste, 
the people turned into beggars." Listen to the Polish 
Deputy. "The population was driven in front, the cattle 
requisitioned, the country devastated." And the Letts will 
tell you of similar persecution, and the Ruthenians of the 
persecutions of their Press and their religion ; and the Finns 
of further encroachments on their constitution, and the 
Russian people generally of Trade Unions rooted out and 
the press strangled. 

"What will they say in France, our great democratic 
Ally?" thundered a Russian orator at the Duma. "What 
will they say in liberty-loving England? " 



JEWISH FACTOR IN THE WAR AND THE SETTLEMENT 427 

Liberty-loving England! Blindfolded England, whose 
heroic sons have offered their lives for righteousness, but 
whose able editors and governors have sent them to death 
with their eyes bandaged. 

"Unparalleled political hypocrisy and cynicism!" I 
thank thee, Russ, for teaching me that word. Pliny tells 
us that after the death of Domitian the Romans flocked 
to hear the orators recounting the tales of the tyrant's 
victims but that they could hardly bear to listen for sheer 
shame at their own passive complicity in his crimes. I 
believe it is with a similar feeling that Englishmen will one 
day hear what has been going on in this war. For we are 
living through one of those periods described by Mommsen 
when words no longer correspond to things. 

Bismarck said that the Germans feared God and had 
no other fear. Sir Edward Grey feared Russia and had 
no fear for England's dishonor. I do not say he has not 
made protests. He has — but tepid, timorous. So far, 
England is the only country that the Steam Roller has 
crushed. 

VI 

"The fear of God," says the Bible — that somewhat dis- 
credited work — "is the beginning of wisdom." But has 
the fear of Russia been really the beginning of wisdom? 
Let the whilom Russian Ambassador at Washington speak 
again. "It is inconceivable," he told the Imperial Council 
this September, "that those who guide our home policy 
should not be able to realize that by our mediaeval treat- 
ment of the Jewish population of Russia, and by our sys- 
tematic outrages upon the constitutional habit of mind 
of the Finnish people we are helping enormously the pro- 
German propaganda in neutral countries which our enemies 
carry on with lavish means to the detriment of the cause 



428 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

of the Allies!" Yes, indeed, these things of which we are 
not permitted a whisper here, lose nothing, we may be sure, 
heard through the German megaphone. And then we 
wonder that the Bryce report on Belgium leaves the Swedes 
or Roumanians comparatively cold, and Professor Wilson 
and the Pope are not as furiously British as Mr. Blatchford. 
Vain to expect these atrocities on enemies to move the 
neutrals when Russia has provided such an antidote in 
the shape of atrocities on her own subjects. In the recent 
debate on the alleged indiscretions of the Times Ministers 
made great play with the importance of influencing neu- 
trals. Yet this is how they have influenced them. 

I said Sir Edward Grey had made protests — but as a 
favor to the Jews, crumbs thrown to a beggar. He has not 
apparently understood the importance to England of Liber- 
alizing Russia. It is not only that the national unity so 
necessary to peaceful warfare was shattered from within, 
Russia's will to victory enfeebled. All these oppressed 
minorities of religion and race have — like the Jews, brethren 
in other lands, 1 and some — like the Moslem — infinitely 
more powerful brethren than the Jews. What of the Holy 
War which Germany had not succeeded in kindling? What 
of the reverberation in India with its sixty-two millions 
of Mussulmans? 

And when a portion of the Ukrainian population whose 
newspapers have been suppressed and whose religion op- 
pressed, finds itself captured by the Germans, what — asked 
Milyukoff— must be the effect on their brethren living 
on the still Russian side of the frontier, when they see the 
new free Ukrainian literature springing up under the wily 
conquerors? Will they in fact not pray likewise to come 
under "Prussian militarism?" And the conquered Galician 

I I had sent me a Spanish Journal of Rosario (Argentine) with an article 
on the Persecution of the Jews in Russia and the Duma Speeches. 



JEWISH FACTOR IN THE WAR AND THE SETTLEMENT 429 

Poles — the Catholics — were they likely to remain content 
with the promise of the resurrection of Poland when the 
first fruit of Russian rule was the proclamation of the 
Greek Church as the established religion? And the com- 
mercial classes half-ruined by the expulsion of the Jews, 
how can they continue to finance the war? And the de- 
populated zones, how can they feed the army? And the 
goods the Jews are compelled to leave behind — may they not 
ultimately increase the German war-store? And the trains 
so badly wanted for the transport of munitions — why 
must a train with one hundred and ten trucksful of Jews, 
living or dead, be kept waiting two days in a siding? 
All these questions you will find in the Duma debates, 
together with the significant remark of Dzioubinski that 
the military authorities direct a mass of energy towards 
politics, — and that bad politics, — instead of towards their 
legitimate goal. But in the language of a distinguished 
Russian, an army that makes politics cannot make war. 

"What will they say in England?" But, you see, poor 
fog-bound England knew nothing of these doings. While 
all that was best in Russia was proud of the Alliance with 
the Mother of Parliaments, and was yearning for an en- 
couraging word of comradeship from the countrymen of 
Byron in the common fight for freedom and progress, 1 
nothing has reached Russia from England save a chorus of 
adulation capped by Stephen Graham's sentimental glori- 
fications of the old order — effusions which have been de- 
nounced by the intelligentsia and leading Russian news- 
papers as a systematic misleading of the British people. 
Can we wonder if millions of Russians of all sects and 

1 Interview with Miliukoff (Daily Chronicle, March 1, 1916): "You would 
not offend the Russian people, you would not even offend the best men in 
the Government, if your papers applauded these ideas and expressed sym- 
pathy with those who are working in Russia for their fulfilment." 



430 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

races begin to see hope for Russia only in the defeat of 
Russia? I tried to arouse England to the danger to the 
common cause, I explained orally to the Foreign Office 
why the Steam Roller was in retreat, and I tried to explain 
to Englishmen at large why it was essential to victory that 
they should rally by an expression of sympathy the faint- 
ing energies of Russian Liberalism. But the great Liberal 
organs and magazines had established a self-denying ordi- 
nance, and when at last the Daily Chronicle put my patriotic 
article in type, every word of it was blue-pencilled by a 
pro-German censor. 1 

VII 

Mr. Brailsford, in a brilliant chapter, has pointed out that, 
through the necessities of modern political grouping, na- 
tions no longer retain their full sovereign rights and that, 
therefore, they may the less reluctantly pass over the future 
World-State. That thought is at once an explanation, a 
consolation, and a warning. England is literally not her- 
self. She is Russia, France, Italy, Serbia, even Japan. 
I have urged upon the neutral Jew to trust in the influence 
of France and England upon Russia. So far, however, 
it appears that liberty, like water, seeks its lowest level. 
And the moral is — what Professor Dicey felt by instinct — 
that the world must be treated as a whole, since any 

'■According to the Times, February 28, 1916, the Labor Party in Russia 
declares that its opposition to the Government is based mainly on its in- 
sistence that the Government's activities during the last five months are 
incompatible with the interests of national defence and of the country. The 
Constitutional Democratic Congress in a manifesto says: The task of re- 
pulsing the foe is inseparably connected with the task of our internal con- 
struction. 

At the luncheon to the Russian journalists, Mons. V. Nabokoff clearly 
characterized the upper class anti-democrats as down on their knees before 
their supreme idol, the Prussian mailed fist. {Times, March 7, 1916.) 



JEWISH FACTOR IN THE WAR AND THE SETTLEMENT 43 1 

nation, however ignoble, or even any tribe however savage, 
may now become the ally and alloy of any nation, however 
noble. It is clear that advanced peoples can no longer 
maintain their freedom and ideals, nor the gains of civili- 
zation be regarded as secure, till the whole world is lifted 
to the same level. 

Thus, it is not as a Jew that I stand here asking for jus- 
tice. Both our ideal interests as Englishmen and our 
practical interests as belligerents demand the immediate 
emancipation of the Russian Jew, as of every other op- 
pressed nationality in the Russian Empire. It cannot be 
postponed till the Settlement, for it is a war-need even more 
than a peace-need. It will help to win the war. Why is 
national unity less vital to Russia than to England and 
France? Why have the Allies who finance her so lavishly 
not demanded a Coalition Government? 

But while Sir Edward Grey has been shivering before 
Russia, the Russo- Jewish problem like the Ukrainian prob- 
lem, and the Polish problem, has partially solved itself 
pro tern, at least. A third of the prisoners of the Pale have 
been annexed by Germany, and they have already equal 
rights and education. 1 The lovers of liberty who rhap- 
sodized over Russia's promise of an independent Poland 
are now trembling lest the Kaiser carry it out. 

1 The Germans, two and one-half months after taking Warsaw, opened the 
long-denied Polish University. There are two Jewish professors. The Muni- 
cipal affairs of Brilystock are managed by a Citizens' Committee, four Poles, 
four Jews, and a German chairman. The Germans have opened Yiddish 
schools and issued a Yiddish newspaper under title of Official Gazette. There 
is, however, terrible poverty, 50,000 Jews eating daily in Warsaw at the Soup 
Kitchen (many are beggars). The German Governor of Poland, Von Puttka- 
mer, says that the conditions in many parts seem revolting, and that although 
the Jews have collected two and one-half million roubles towards the general 
charity fund of 11,000,000 roubles, they have only been given 150,000 by the 
Poles. "The Jews are afraid of the Poles, and have no confidence in the 
German Government," he sums up. Germany proper is already agitated 
by the fear of large Jewish immigration from its new provinces. 



432 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

In that case, however, the Galician Jews might be worse 
off than before. For in the very midst of their paeans of 
Liberty and their denunciations of the Russian tyrant, 
the Poles were contemplating the refusal of equal rights 
to the two million Jews against whom they had been carry- 
ing on a bitter boycott. These beggars were not yet on 
horseback before they saw the hooves of their steeds tramp- 
ling on poorer devils. As you have had a lecture on Poland, 
you will be aware that the old Poland of 1772 embraced, 
besides Poles proper, the Lithuanians and the Letts, 
peoples not of Slav but of Baltic origin who now clamor 
for separate nationality, and the White-Russians and 
Ukrainians or Ruthenians, whose differentia is religious. 
But the dream of Poland is to rule over them all. 1 

Big folk have little folk upon whose rights to trample; 
Little folk have lesser folk and follow the example. 

Even Sienkiewicz who appealed to the conscience of the 
world on behalf of the Poles in Prussia has omitted to 
protest against the boycott of the Jews by his own 
countrymen. 

VIII 

A critic in a French magazine, reviewing some Ghetto 
stories, remarked that reading them was like seeing the 
bay, on whose shore he lived, from the opposite curve, 
so that all his familiar landmarks were reversed or revealed 
under a new aspect. Thus, his own people, so serenely con- 

1 The Germans freed from Napoleon, crushed down Danes and Poles. 
Despite the liberty-lauding oratory of Kossuth, the Magyars now crush 
down Slovaks, Ruthenes and Roumanians. The treatment of the Jews by 
the Roumanians is a by-word. Finland oppresses the Jews and parodies the 
Russian Pole. Among the Jews the Zionist majority crushed the minority. 
There has never yet been a fight for Liberty — only for one's own liberty, 
Even the Montenegrins, Tennyson's "rough rock throne of Freedom" have 
monstrously persecuted the Catholic Albanians. 



JEWISH FACTOR IN THE WAR AND THE SETTLEMENT 433 

scious of their centralism were turned into "the heathen," 
while their religion, the last word of sweetness and light, 
now appeared as a synonym for hatred and darkness. 
To-day, a Ghetto story, especially if laid in the Russo- 
Polish Pale, would reveal the war for righteousness as an 
incomprehensible nightmare in which the Jew, fervent to 
pour out his blood and his treasure for Russia, finds himself 
hounded and tortured between the separate hates of the 
Russian and the Pole and only saved by the conquering 
Kaiser, bringing, like Napoleon, equal rights for all races. 
Even in England the Jew who won the Victoria Cross and 
was refused a meal in a restaurant in one of our greatest 
liberal centres, in Leeds 1 to be precise, must have been 
somewhat bemused, the more so as he himself makes 
speeches on the Asquith model. 

The angle at which the Jew sees the war can thus rarely 
be what the Censorship Bureau would consider a right 
angle — it is either too obtuse or too acute. A Christian 
Gunner — if that is not an Irish bull — wrote to the Yorkshire 
Evening Post: "I am a Britisher, home on seven days' 
leave, after being out in France for fifteen months. . . . 
What has surprised me as much as anything in this war of 
surprises is the great number of Jewish boys who are doing 
their bit at the front and doing it right. Most of them have 
enlisted under wrong names, hiding their proper names 
under English ones. Some of my best pals at the front are 
Jews, whom anyone would welcome as pals and who are 
true as steel." 

That the Christian Gunner is not exaggerating, let the 
story of Private Sam Thomson illustrate — the young sig- 
naller of the Camerons who, in a house at Loos, killed single- 

1 A town where a Mrs. A. Levy has six sons at the front, two wounded at 
Neuve Chapelle, and an old boy of which — Harry Grows — came all the way 
from Boston, U. S. A., to enlist. 



434 THE WAR F0R THE WORLD 

handed three Germans and captured thirty, and whose 
real name was Sam Woolf. Sam was anxious to give his 
all for England, yet he felt it necessary to smuggle himself 
into her army. And it is a sad fact that despite the resound- 
ing cry for recruits, Jews have been frequently refused or, 
accepted, "chipped," as it is called, by their comrades. 
It is the same in the French trenches, where the Jewish 
volunteers of the French Foreign Legion are accused of 
enlisting for the food. Even a Jewish officer in an Eng- 
lish regiment who gave up the bar to enlist found life almost 
unbearable. 

And if this is so in free democracies, what must be the 
situation in Russia, where even the law is on the side of 
the mob; what must have been the patriotism of those 
persecuted French Volunteers who being shot as mutineers 
for demanding to be removed to another regiment, faced 
the firing squad with unbandaged eyes, crying: "Vive 
la France! Vive la Russie!" Surely Jews are the only 
Christians nowadays. 

IX 

So much for the Jewish factor in the war. It has re- 
peated you see, the sufferings and heroism of Belgium, but 
without its glories and without its hopes. The notion that 
after the war the world will be righteously re-arranged and 
Sir Edward Grey will wipe away the tears from off all 
faces, has already been dissipated by his bribes — rejected 
or accepted, to Bulgaria, Greece, and Italy. The war has 
degenerated — under pressure of necessity — into an old- 
fashioned affair of spoils and rewards. It is true that 
President Wilson has announced that at the Peace Settle- 
ment he will press for equal rights for the Russian and 
Roumanian Jews but I do not know that he will be asked 



JEWISH FACTOR IN THE WAR AND THE SETTLEMENT 435 

to the Conference. It is true that the Berlin Congress of 
1878 accorded equal rights to the Jews of Roumania but 
this Jewish clause has been left by all the guaranteeing 
Powers, England included, "a scrap of paper." 

The Fabians are accustomed to make large constructive 
demands upon Christendom, and you harbor more than 
one speculative sociologist, who baits and badgers our 
poor humanity with demands for a radical reconstruction 
of its ways of living, thinking and even feeling: a revalua- 
tion of all values. My own demand upon Christendom has 
been precisely the opposite — I have asked it only to carry 
out its most conventional doctrines. I have not even asked 
for Christianity, only for the pre-Christian virtues: justice, 
kindness, fair-play. Perhaps my demand was the more 
revolutionary of the two: at any rate it has been no more 
successful. 

There are indeed signs that after the war the long agony 
of the Russian Jew will find alleviation — but it will not be 
through the action of Christians or of statesmen. What is 
bringing about the emancipation of Russian Jewry is not 
the pale God of Galilee, but Mammon and Mars. The very 
expulsions of the war, the congestions of refugees, have 
broken down the pale and created a new order, which can 
never quite return to the old, though the "Black Hun- 
dreds" and the "True Russians" (or "True Prussians" as 
they are now called in Russia), are moving hell and earth 
to bring back yesterday. And at the moment they have 
almost succeeded. 

The most reactionary parties are in power, Liberal 
Groups and even Moderates have been baffled, the Duma 
has been indefinitely closed, the manoeuvre (already exposed 
in that assembly) , of egging on the Christian soldiers against 
their Jewish comrades exploited afresh with a diabolical 
cunning that perceives that in the Jewish valor and manifold 



436 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

military distinctions, with the 80,000 Jewish casualties al- 
ready known, lie the collapse of the whole "True Russian" 
case. 

Secret orders have been issued to the commanders to 
report on the behavior of the Jewish soldiers, i. e., of course, 
on their misbehavior, with a view to excluding Jews from 
the army altogether after the war. With a strange hash of 
war and politics, army orders arraign the slackness of the 
Jewish soldiers who yet dare to demand equal rights; their 
Jewish- German speech is proclaimed the obvious channel of 
communication with the enemy and this though every 
attempt to establish charges of treachery and espionage has 
broken down. Hence an intolerable situation for the Jewish 
soldiers on all the fronts, friction with, sometimes assassina- 
tion by, their comrades; to the weakening of the Russian 
army and the Allied cause; and in Jewish towns renewed 
plunderings and burnings of houses, blood-ritual charges, 
pogroms, expulsions, violations of women. 1 

X 

And yet I do not despair. For all the intelligent classes in 
Russia have now discovered that in the Jews Russia pos- 
sesses a commercial asset more valuable than all her oil- 
wells, and if the Germans are not to come back, the Jews 

1 According to an interpellation in the Duma the Moscow police recently 
carried out an anti-Semitic raid. (Times, March 11, 1916.) The latest of 
these incendiary documents — a recent circular accusing Jews of fomenting 
strikes and revolutions and buying up coin— was exposed recently in the 
Duma and published in the Sunday Times. It led to looting at Baku, di- 
rectly incited by the police. The situation at the moment of going to press 
is very black, and even in the Duma the Pro- Jewish Block has been half- 
shattered. It may be here recalled that General Freynoht, the unjust judge 
in the Kishineff pogrom trial, has been now sentenced to penal servitude 
for life for high treason, while his colleague Colonel Miassoiedoff has been 
hanged. 



JEWISH FACTOR IN THE WAR AND THE SETTLEMENT 437 

must be given a free hand — and a free foot — in developing 
Russia for the commonwealth. I may regret, as much as 
Stephen Graham, the passing of the old Russia with its 
idyllic ignorance, simple piety and village socialism, but 
Russia is too rich a territory to remain unexploited and the 
Germans were fast changing it into a modern industrial 
state. And so all the commercial classes of Holy Russia 
are now clamoring for the Pale of Settlement to be abolished. 
The Zemtsvos or agricultural communities of the Empire, 
and the Congress of the towns, the all-Russian Military 
Commercial Conference, the all-Russian Conference of 
Lawyers, the Conference of the Stock Exchange Com- 
mittees, even the Conference of the Siberian Municipali- 
ties, unanimously echo the cry. The very Cossacks demand 
an import of Jews into their undeveloped districts — indeed, 
Jews are by no means unpopular among the Russian peas- 
antry; on the contrary, Russia is the only country where 
Judaism gains converts, the Saturdayites and the new 
Israelites, who are stricter than the Jews proper. 

I must not deny that besides the commercial demand 
there is also an idealistic demand — indeed, this was plain 
from the speeches I have quoted. A very noble and states- 
manlike pro- Jewish manifesto was published by the in- 
telligentsia — in Russia no less than in England the intel- 
lectual classes understand politics better than the Cabinet 
classes. The novelists Gorky, Andreyev and Mereshkovsky 
are the chief contributors to a book just issued, called 
The Shield which declares that the treatment of the 
Jews is the dishonor of Russia. I quote some detached 
sentences from Gorky's introduction. 

"It is a heavy task — one feels painfully awkward; sug- 
gesting to grown-up and educated people: Be human. 
Hatred toward the Jews is purely zoological or pathological. 
The Jews are human beings and therefore they must be 



438 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

free — as all others are. So much has been said of the 
glorious, broad, beautiful Russian soul. One begins to ask 
despairingly where really is its breadth, its strength, its 
beauty? The situation of the Jews in Russia is an ignominy 
to Russian culture: it is a result of our negligence toward 
ourselves. It is our conscience that is blotted by the poison 
of calumny, the tears and blood of numberless pogroms. 
The Jews are more European than we, for to begin with, the 
feeling of respect to labor and to human life is more de- 
veloped in them. I admire the spiritual struggle of the 
Jewish people, their sturdy idealism, their unshakable be- 
lief in the victory of good over evil and in the possibilities 
of happiness on earth. The Jews are the old and powerful 
yeast of mankind. They have always elevated its spirit, 
bringing new and stirring noble thoughts and calling forth 
new strivings after the better things. We Russians might 
and can learn much from the Jews." 

Andreyev goes further and recalling "the heroism of the 
Jews and their tragic and deep love for the land of their 
birth," confesses that he suffers by their persecution and 
that Russia's allies are secretly ashamed of her barbarism, 
and asks, " Are we not the Jews of Europe, looked on askance 
by the Western nations?" A block composed of groups of 
the Duma and Imperial Council of all parties except the 
extreme right and the extreme left has long demanded the 
complete abolition of all Jewish disqualifications — indeed, 
there is a majority for this demand in both houses. "What 
great work can be accomplished," asked an orator in the 
Duma, "what great problem solved by a nation in which 
millions of citizens are treated as slaves and pariahs?" 
Even the bureaucracy with a touch of right feeling has 
abolished the educational restrictions in favor of the rela- 
tives of soldiers at the front. On every side the rotten 
fencing of the Pale is giving way of itself — at one brave 



JEWISH FACTOR IN THE WAR AND THE SETTLEMENT 439 

knightly blast from Sir Edward Grey's horn it would 
collapse like the walls of Jericho. 1 Even the Poles are 
beginning to bethink themselves. In Warsaw, under the 
mitigated affliction of the Kaiser's rule, they are co-operat- 
ing with the Jews in keeping public order. 

Their common misfortunes, said Prince Lubomirsky, 
the Mayor of Warsaw, would beget harmony. Professor 
Yavorsky, the President of the Chief Polish Council, has 
published at Vienna a statement admitting that Jews should 
receive full rights in an independent Poland. Whether in 
Poland or in Russia, the Jews will be loyal and valuable 
citizens. They do not cherish rancor. A Jewish soldier 
saved the life of the chairman of the Jew-baiting order, the 
Double-Headed Eagle. ' ' An eye for an eye and a tooth for a 
tooth"— which was never a motto for vengeance, but only a 
legal maxim for the Hebrew courts in adjudging compensa- 
tion for bodily damage— was practically abolished, even 
in the courts, centuries before the Christian era. 

It is with grim amusement that I have watched this 
much-abused maxim of the barbarous Jew glorified into a 
popular slogan of contemporary Christendom. No, there 
will be no danger to Russia from Jewish emancipation. The 
only danger will be to the Jewish race deprived of the ring- 
fence of persecution within which an unintelligent anti- 
Semitism has conserved it. Such a solution of the Jewish 
problem, unless accompanied by the concession of a core of 
nationality under a Federal concept, might well be the 
dissolution of the Jew. 2 

That is why even the most satisfactory measure of 
emancipation would leave the Jew unsatisfied if the peace 

1 Jews at the moment reside in every Russian town except those containing 
royal residences. 

2 Seventeen per cent of the marriages of Jews in Germany in 191 1 were 
with Christians, in 1915 the rate had risen to thirty-one per cent. 



44-0 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

settlement produced a world parliament, as some hopelessly 
hopeful speculators still anticipate. The Jews would not 
even be satisfied with the more practicable and limited 
Super-national Authority proposed by the Fabian Society. 
Like the Times' Altas, the able memorandum inspired by 
Mr. S. Woolf is utterly unaware of Jews — a final proof of 
their lack of self -consciousness. But the angle from which 
the conscious Jew sees the world is like the angle from which 
the homeless tramp peers in at the dinner party. I have 
dramatically put into the mouth of a German war lord the 
argument that England's loathing for Prussian bellicosity 
is only the psychology of the successful gambler who 
wishes to break off the game at the moment he holds the 
bulk of the stakes. And, in truth, to eternalize the momen- 
tary grouping of peoples and possessions in a world that has 
hitherto always proceeded by flux and combat, in which 
empires have risen and set, in which every hill has been 
abased and every valley exalted as unfailingly as by geologic 
process, would be to make not a righteous but an un- 
righteous peace. 

There must, if the flux is to be suddenly frozen, be a 
universal readjustment on the basis of reason and love. 
Otherwise, can any one tell me why Russia should be left 
in perpetual possession of half of Europe and a third of 
Asia, or one-sixth of the land of the globe, while Jewry 
owns not a single square inch of national territory? The 
Fabian project recognizes between forty and fifty sov- 
ereign states. I know these sovereign states. One of the 
greatest (America) professes to have the right to exclude 
and reship the poverty-stricken European emigrant after 
he has sold off his all in the quest for a better labor market. 
And this, with a territory almost as large as Europe, peo- 
pled by little more than twice the population of Great 
Britain. A sovereign right, Mr. Cecil Chesterton proclaims 



JEWISH FACTOR IN THE WAR AND THE SETTLEMENT 44 1 

it. As a director of emigration, whose heart has been torn 
by these tragedies, I spit on these sovereign rights. 

Mr. Chesterton, who has done yeoman service in America 
as a champion of the allied cause, 1 does not seem to see 
that for a petty population to collar a continent is pure 
Prussianism. The Germans demand the freedom of the 
seas. The Jews demand the freedom of the lands. 

And these great powers, that are to be confirmed for 
all time in their great possessions, they are to have a free 
hand over their subjects. The supernational authority, 
says the Fabian scheme, is not to require any alteration 
in their internal laws. How familiar it sounds! "I cannot 
interfere in the internal affairs of Russia." The hands are 
the hands of the Fabians, but the voice is the voice of 
Sir Edward Grey. You make a moral desert and call it 
peace. 

No; for the Jew your world-peace would be a premature, 
an all-too-conclusive peace. The world is not yet ripe 
enough. Leaden instincts cannot, as Herbert Spencer 
pointed out, be transmuted into the gold of an ethical 
civilization. If human nature were ripe for peace, any 
scheme, however bad, would ensure it. As things are, the 
best scheme will not avail. I do not even believe in these 
dramatic eliminations of evil. As a dramatist myself, I 
am not taken in by "happy endings" — I know that the 
story must go on, though the curtain has fallen, that the 
tableau breaks up and the devil that has departed by the 
stage door may fly in again from the pit. Still, were the 
landlessness of the Jews the only obstacle to universal 
Peace, I should be the first to waive their claim. Jerusa- 

1 Except that his anti-Semitism laid him and his country open to such 
retorts as "If you are the spokesman of intellectual England, then I can 
understand why your country should have formed an alliance with the 
country of pogroms!" (Salvoes of applause.) The Viereck Chesterton De- 
bate, Published by The Fatherland Corporation, New York. 



442 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

lem, which means the heritage of double peace, would be 
better built so than by actual restoration. 

Though half my manhood has been devoted to the quest 
for a Jewish State, I have never regarded a world settle- 
ment, based on racial differences, as a final goal, nor do I 
share the current enthusiasm for the smaller nationalities. 
The mere fact that a group of people hates its neighbors 
affords no basis for reverence. Moses told the Jews, "Thou 
shalt love thy neighbor as thyself," and Seneca reminded 
the imperial Romans that all men are sacred — homo sacra 
res homini. Moreover, the world always has been and 
always will be a melting-pot. 1 It is curious that even 
before the present German megalomania began Fichte 
claimed the French as a people of Teutonic stock, no less 
than the Spaniards and the Italians, and it is true that a 
Gothic strain exists in them all. 

The alien internment camps throughout Europe are 
like scientific illustrations of the fusing process caught in 
the act. As for Jewish blood, I am probably the only per- 
son in London who has never been suspected of it. The 
eighteenth century may have pushed cosmopolitanism 
too far. The nineteenth reacted with equal exaggeration 
to nationalism, and the twentieth is an era of nationalism 
run mad. 2 With Schechter, the great Jewish scholar, 
whose loss we are just lamenting, I feel that for salvation 
our ravaged world will have to turn back to international 
ideals — and these the old Jewish ideals, "to do justice, 
have mercy and walk humbly with thy God." The claims 

1 Even the Jews have developed a hybrid strain of Spanish Jew. The 
Levantine Jews, expelled from Spain about 1492, still have journals in the 
Spanish of Cervantes and a loyal sentiment for King Alfonso. 

2 Lord Acton (from the Catholic standpoint) considered that "the Treaty 
of Nationality is more absurd and criminal than the Treaty of Socialism." 
{History of Freedom.) The worst of trying to kill two birds with one 
stone is that it often falls between both. 



JEWISH FACTOR IN THE WAR AND THE SETTLEMENT 443 

of the Jewish race do not rest on its separate blood, but on 
its quality and its history. 

XI 

I have referred to the funniness of Thackeray's burlesque 
of Disraeli. And yet I should be quite content to take my 
summary of the Jewish position from Codlingsby. "Over 
the entire world," mused the Marquis, "spreads a vast 
brotherhood, suffering, silent, scattered, sympathizing, 
waiting — an immense Freemasonry. Once this widespread 
band was an Arabian clan — a little nation alone and out- 
lying amongst the mighty monarchies of ancient time, 
the Megatheria of history. The sails of their rare ships 
might be seen in the Egyptian waters; the camels of their 
caravans might thread the sands of Baalbec, or wind 
through the date-groves of Damascus: their flag was raised 
not ingloriously, in many wars, against mighty odds; but 
'twas a small people, and on one dark night the Lion of 
Judah went down before Vespasian's Eagles, and in flame 
and death and struggle Jerusalem agonized and died." 

Truth, you see, will out, even in a jester's mouth, for the 
art of burlesque, which depends on the assumption that 
there is nothing great or romantic, stumbles into sheer 
reality when the faces are so strange and tragic that the 
highfalutin' of parody is too lowly rather than too lofty 
for them. Thackeray was no less veraciously inspired 
here than George Eliot in Daniel Deronda. The picture 
only fails in completeness because Thackeray — correctly 
following his model — laid too much stress on the material 
romance of the ships and camels and warriors of ancient 
Judaea, and neglected the infinitely more important king- 
dom of the spirit whose foundations Judaea laid. 

"In the eighth century before Christ," says Professor 
Huxley, "in the heart of a world of idolatrous polytheists, 



444 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

the Hebrew prophets put forth a conception of religion 
which appears to me as wonderful an inspiration of genius 
as the art of Phidias or the science of Aristotle." Eight 
centuries later the conception to which Huxley paid tribute 
was crystallized and carried to a wider audience by a young 
Jew from Galilee and six centuries after that was accom- 
modated to the Arab mind by another Semite near Mecca. 
Without a knowledge of the Bible, which, in the words 
of Lord Bryce, is "the one piece of literature, ancient or 
modern, that is common to all the peoples of European 
origin in both hemispheres," European art and literature 
would be unintelligible. After collision with every great 
ancient empire and persecution by every modern, the race 
that wrote the Old Testament and the New survived to 
write the gospels of modern socialism, and remains to-day 
one of the factors of human evolution, one of the roads to 
the super-race. 

XII 

Its existence even in dispersion enriches the world, 
giving in our own day a Meldola to British science, a Berg- 
son to French philosophy, a Schnitzler to Austrian drama, 
a Berenson to American art criticism, an Ehrlich to German 
medicine, a Luzzatti to Italian statesmanship, a Josef 
Israels to Dutch painting, a Brandes to Scandinavian 
criticism, a Ronetti Roman to Rumanian poetry, a Rubin- 
stein to Russian music, a Vambery to Hungarian adven- 
ture, an Enver Pasha to Turkish arms, a Zamenhof to 
Esperanto internationalism, a Sarah Bernhardt to the 
world's stage, a Leo Bakst to the newest Nobel Prize-list. 1 
Concentrated on a soil of its own, under conditions that 

1 Six other Jews have received the Nobel prize — Albert Michelson, physics 
(Chicago), Gabriel Lippmann, color-painting (Paris), Paul Ehrlich, medicine 
(Frankfort), Professor Aster, jurist (Holland), Alfred Fried, Peace-advocate 
(Germany), Dr. Barony, otologist (Austria), now a prisoner of war in Russia. 



JEWISH FACTOR IN THE WAR AND THE SETTLEMENT 445 

might stimulate afresh its spiritual genius, this stock 
might well produce a superstate, a kultur, not of mili- 
tarism but of humanism. 

But where is this state to be? 

That question was first mooted in this very hall by the 
International Council of the organization over which I 
have the honor to preside, for the Zionist movement had 
plumped for Palestine without any practical investigation. 
The limitations of time prevent me from discussing the 
answers in any detail. Joseph Chamberlain it was who 
first tempted the late Dr. Herzl, the great Zionist leader, 
with portions of the British Empire, first with El-Arisch 
in the Sinai Peninsula, and, when the Khedival Govern- 
ment made a difficulty about deflecting the water — with a 
small plateau in British East Africa. I converted Mr. 
Chamberlain to the conception of not a plateau but the 
whole of British East Africa turned into a British Judaea 
and had the conception been carried out, England to-day 
would have had a Maccabean force to defend that zone 
of war against the Germans. My organization has not 
dealt with governments on any basis but the Bismarckian 
do ut des. But a Chamberlain is rare. It apparently re- 
quires a most abnormal statesman to see that an empire 
which is trying to hold a fifth of the globe with an external 
force of ten million white, would be strengthened by a 
powerful and well-populated Jewish colony. 

Lord Strathcona saw this as regards Canada but not 
Sir Wilfrid Laurier. Mr. Deakin saw it for Australia but 
not his local Premiers. Your Colonial Briton is ever a 
dog-in-the-manger. We have dealt also with Turkey, not 
for Palestine, but for Cyrenaica, since bloodily and im- 
perfectly annexed by Italy, despite the report of our scien- 
tific commission that it was not good enough even for the 
homeless Jews. And a similar expedition went to Angola 



446 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

by arrangement with the Portuguese Colonial Office, and 
its report, which we have published, was to have been dis- 
cussed at Zurich in the very month the war broke out, 
together with an earlier proposal for re-converting Mesopo- 
tamia into a world-granary by irrigating it — at the cost 
of a few hours of Armageddon — and settling it with Jewish 
homesteads. 

The project has been recently revived by Mr. Hermann 
Landau, a philanthropist, who has the advantage over me 
with the public of having himself made money. He con- 
tends that there is a profit of ninety millions in the scheme, 
so that I, who only estimated it at twenty-two millions, 
have begun to loom as the soberer business man of the two. 
Mesopotamia, you will remember, is not only a blessed 
word, but the cradle of the Jewish race, with a Hebrew 
tradition older than Palestine's and embracing also a later 
period of bloom. For a thousand years Babylonia was the 
very focus of Judaism. Jews have lived there under the 
successive domination of the Greeks, the Parthians, the 
Persians, the Arabs, the Mongols and the Turks, and are 
still there to-day in parts now under the British flag, which 
according to Sir John Jackson the Arabs would like to see 
waving over all Mesopotamia. Did I not say that even 
Thackeray's burlesque could not reach the romance of 
reality? 

And finally there is Palestine, which, as the Manchester 
Guardian explains, is now necessary to the British Empire, 
inasmuch as "there can be no satisfactory defence of 
Egypt or the Suez Canal so long as Palestine is in the oc- 
cupation of a hostile or possibly hostile power." If Britain 
took Palestine she could make no greater stroke of policy 
than to call in the Jews to regenerate it for her. Failing 
this conquest, even if Turkey, under German shrewdness, 
made a similar offer to the Jews, I for one would hold no 



JEWISH FACTOR IN THE WAR AND THE SETTLEMENT 447 

truck with the assassins of the Armenians, should it turn 
out that the Turks proper and not the Kurds are respon- 
sible. The acceptance of Palestine from such a power 
would be an anti-climax to Jewish history. 1 

1 Mr. Morgenthau suggested that Turkey sell Palestine to the Jews 
and found the ministers willing. They even discussed whether it should 
be turned into a Republic. Prince Nicholas, despatching Jewish soldiers to 
the Caucasus, is said to have told them to go and conquer Palestine for them- 
selves. Of course Russia and France also claim Palestine, and five monarchs 
rejoice in the title of "King of Jerusalem," the Sultan of Turkey, the Kings 
of Spain and Italy, the Emperor of Austria and — ex-King Manoel! Sir 
Edward Pears suggests an international Commission, a correspondent of the 
Near East proposes tacking Palestine on to Egypt. At the Peace Con- 
ference, says Gustave Herve, in summing up the reforms necessary, " La 
Palestine a. la vieille et glorieuse nation juive qui depuis deux mille ans at- 
tend si heroiquement, dans certains pays ou elle est persecuted, la venue du 
Messie et le regne de la justice et de la paix sur la terre enti&re! {La Guerre 
Sociale, Paris, February 2, 1915.) 

The following correspondence appeared in the Daily Chronicle of Novem- 
ber, 19 14: 

TO MR. ZANGWILL 

[Per favor of the Daily Chronicle] 

Dear Mr. Zangwill, — And now, what is to prevent the Jews having Pales- 
tine and restoring a real Judaea? — Yours very sincerely, 

H. G. Wells. 
To Mr. Wells 
[Per favor of the Daily Chronicle] 

Dear Mr. Wells, — Your War in the Air, published in 1908, has become a 
reality so soon that I dare not reply too sceptically to your suggestion that 
the time is ripe to recreate the old Judaea in Palestine. That idea is cer- 
tainly in the air. And, enormous as are the obstacles and difficulties — 
difficulties which have led me to suggest a new Judaea in Canada or else- 
where — they would assuredly lessen if Englishmen of your stamp would 
work to ensure British suzerainty for the new State. But grateful as all 
true Jews would be for such help from Englishmen, they could only accept 
it if its motive was pro-Jewish, not anti- Jewish, justice and not Jew-hate. 
Palestine could only receive and support the Jews in small instalments, and 
as the majority of the thirteen millions must long inhabit their present homes, 
an offer of Palestine, coupled with an aspiration, or worse! a policy for the 
clearance of other countries of Jews — such as Stephen Graham has so naively 
suggested for Poland — -would be a trap from which I should do my best to 
dissuade my fellow- Jews. Nay more! No bait of Palestine will lessen the 



448 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

But even under British suzerainty the restoration of the 
Jews would not be easy. Despite the heroic creations of 
Jewish colonies — now alas! half destroyed — the Jews hold 
too few vested interests in the soil to have a claim to it on 
any basis of realpolitik. They numbered, even before the 
great war emigration, only 100,000 out of 700,000, mainly 
Arabs, and possessed only 2 per cent of the soil. Unless, 
therefore, the Arabs would trek into Arabia, or could be 
peacefully expropriated, any government set up on a con- 
stitutional democratic basis would result not in a Jewish 
autonomy, but an Arab autonomy. 

It all requires a radically imaginative policy, a dealing 
in futures as well as pasts by men ready to rescue human 
history from its monotonous factors of blood and gold. Na- 
poleon, under the spell of the forty centuries that regarded 
him from the Pyramids, announced his design to restore 
the Jews to their land. Will England, with Egypt equally 
at her feet, carry out the plan she foiled Napoleon in? 

Had she the power and the genius to do so, a new chapter 
would be opened in the history of mankind, the ends of the 
ages would meet, and the "tribe of the wandering foot and 
weary breast," which for nineteen hundred years has 
prayed for Palestine some twenty times a day, would find 
itself on its holy soil under the aegis of the greatest empire 
in the world, victorious after the greatest struggle in her 
history. And inasmuch as by her union with Russia Eng- 
land would have marched to this victory over the bodies 
of the Russian Jews, her restoration of Palestine to their 
race would be at once a peace offering to her own conscience 
and a consoling assurance to the martyrs of the Pale that 
they had not agonized in vain. 

insistence of our demand for equal rights in Russia, Rumania, or wherever 

anti-Semitism drags down civilization. 

Very smcerely yours, 

Israel Zangwill. 



TWO LETTERS TO THE TIMES 



To the Editor of The Times. 
Sir, 

As your correspondent mentions me in connection with 
Mr. Chamberlain's offer of a territory to the Zionists, I 
trust I may be permitted to correct his history. It is in- 
deed curious to represent the rejection of the East African 
plateau as having occurred with "no dissentient voice," 
when he himself scarcely conceals that a large minority 
of the Zionists seceded and formed the Jewish Territorial 
Organization rather than countenance this act of folly. 
The project for which I won the sympathy of Mr. Chamber- 
lain was, however, a far wider scheme than that originally 
suggested — nothing less, in fact, than the conversion of 
British East Africa into a British- Jewish colony. British 
East Africa was then a nondescript possession, once de- 
signed to afford an emigration outlet for Hindus, later hailed 
as a paradise for Britons, and suffering, like the British 
Empire in general, from a confused and vacillating policy. 
I suggested to the late Mr. Lyttleton — and my elaborate 
scheme doubtless still lies in the archives of the Colonial 
Office — how British East Africa might be developed so as 
to strengthen this Empire of all creeds and colors by a loyal 
and grateful Jewish land, populated mainly by Jews from 
Russia — agricultural pioneers in the first instance from the 
Jewish farm colonies in the West and South of Russia. 

It is characteristic of Mr. Chamberlain's statesmanship 

449 



450 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

that when I unfolded this scheme to him at his house in 
Prince's-gardens he exclaimed, "There'll be the devil to 
pay, but I'll stick to you through thick and thin." He 
promised to take the platform on behalf of the scheme 
whenever I should give the word. Mr. Chamberlain, then 
at the height of his vitality, was keenly conscious of the 
haphazard fashion in which the British Empire had grown 
up, and as keenly anxious to introduce order and reason into 
its future. Mr. Winston Churchill showed a similar imagi- 
native sympathy with the British- Jewish scheme, which, 
when East Africa became difficult, evolved into the general 
conception of creating a Jewish land of refuge in some part 
of the Empire in need of white population. 

Two such parts leap to the eye — Australia, whose doleful 
and dangerous emptiness The Times correspondent is now 
illustrating afresh (Australia almost as large as Europe 
and with a far smaller population than London), and Can- 
ada, another and still greater continent, in which (according 
to a member of the Dominion Cabinet whose speech on 
Dominion Day was reported in your issue of the 2nd inst.) 
of 441 million acres of possible farm lands only 36 million 
acres are under cultivation. Yet Sir Wilfred Laurier told 
me he could not possibly offer us a tract, and the late Lord 
Strath cona said my application was 10 years too late — 
Canada was now getting all the immigration it needed. 
(He seems to have been too optimistic, for the latest statis- 
tics show a considerable falling off.) As for Australia, 
I found Sir Alfred Deakin as inflexible — if as personally 
charming — as Sir Wilfred Laurier, nor did a lengthy ne- 
gotiation with Sir Newton Moore regarding West Australia 
(which dots the population of Portsmouth over a million 
square miles) yield any better results. 

Sir, your columns bear daily witness to the troubles and 
problems which are avenging the illogicality of the Empire. 



TWO LETTERS TO THE TIMES 45 1 

To hold nearly one-fourth of the globe with only (outside 
these islands) some 10 million white men is certainly a 
miracle of history. But it seems to me a very unstable 
miracle, and an offer to provide white population should 
not, I submit, have received so many rebuffs. To populate 
the great empty spaces of the British Empire with the sur- 
plus population — under a falling birth-rate — of two little 
islands, is impossible, and in so far as it is attempted it 
calls forth protest against "Deserted villages." Never 
was there a more comical example of the desire to eat one's 
cake and to have it too. Even from a moral point of view 
I question the right of any country to hold territories it 
cannot populate while other races are agonizing for lack of 
"a place in the sun." 

Yours obediently, 
Israel Zangwill, President. 



II 

[This letter was in type but was withdrawn by me when the war 
broke out, to await a more favorable opportunity of securing at- 
tention.] 

To the Editor of The Times. 
Sir, 

Mr. Chamberlain's incursion into Jewish politics split 
the Zionist movement precisely as his dynamic personality 
split parties more in the world's eye. But if a minority 
splits off, leaving the majority to its own devices, the his- 
torian, according to your Jewish Correspondent, is justified 
in informing an ignorant public that the voting was unani- 
mous. This is surely to write history with words rather than 
with facts. To anyone who remembers that the fight over 
the East African plateau offered by Mr. Chamberlain to 
the Zionists was one of the bitterest in Jewish history, the 



452 THE WAR FOR THE WORLD 

statement that the rejection was carried "with no dissen- 
tient voice" must appear a monumental combination of the 
suppressio veri with the suggestio falsi. 

Equally amazing is your contributor's assertion that not a 
small plateau in the far interior, but the whole of British 
East Africa was at stake. This is, indeed, a nouveau fait — 
so new that it never emerged during the three years of the 
struggle, and no hint of it appears either in Lord Lans- 
downe's formal offer or in the formal refusal by the Zionist 
Congress. But even if it were as true as it is new, a gradual 
spread of Jewish colonization from a small nucleus under 
merely municipal rights is far removed from the proposi- 
tion which I laid before Mr. Lyttelton, and which he read, 
he told me, "in a glow:" to wit, that British East Africa, 
which was run at a loss and had no specific character, "be 
given in trust to the Jewish people to be worked up into a 
model British colony." To England it was a white elephant 
— even to-day Mr. Lloyd George has to make hay of 
£250,000 to feed it withal — and I proposed that, with due 
safeguarding of existing interests, the Jewish people should 
assume all financial responsibility and take it over as a 
land of refuge for their oppressed masses under the name of 
British Judaea or British Palestine, with a British- Jewish 
Governor as a symbol to both peoples of its dual destiny. 
Mr. Lyttelton agreed that under such a scheme Sir Matthew 
Nathan (now, but not then, a member of the council of 
our organization) would provide an ideal figure for the 
post. That this conception has never been in Mr. Chamber- 
lain's mind was quite clear from his startled acceptance of 
it. His enthusiasm was endorsed in the Government that 
followed by Mr. Winston Churchill in a letter of noble 
eloquence. It was only from East Africa itself that opposi- 
tion ever came. And so it has been with all our attempts 
to find a territory within the British Empire. The man at 



TWO LETTERS TO THE TIMES 453 

the centre sees the perspective; the man in the colony has 
eyes only for himself. 

And this reminds me to say that my former letter did 
injustice to Lord Strathcona if it conveyed the suggestion 
that the epical imagination which had thrown the Canadian 
Pacific Railway across a pathless continent failed to see the 
value of a Jewish colony to the land he loved and had half- 
created. I well remember the marvellous octogenarian in 
his black skull-cap jumping on a chair to point out to me 
on a wall-map the territory he thought the Dominion 
Government would allot to us. It was he who, during the 
Imperial Conference, arranged my interview with Sir 
Wilfrid Laurier and it was "the man from home" who in- 
sisted that Canada could deal only with the individual 
settler. In vain I pointed out to Sir Wilfred Laurier that 
the rigorous Sunday law made Canada almost impossible 
for the individual settler who valued his Judaism, and that 
an empty land like Canada had a duty towards a people 
that had just undergone one of the greatest massacres in 
all history. Canada, he replied, could not alter its policy 
under any circumstances. 

Whether, however, at a period when, according to Mrs. 
Sidney Webb, the artificial restriction of the birth-rate 
menaces the whole future of white civilization, when even 
France must import colored labor, and when Canada her- 
self is receiving the lesson of a reduced immigration, the 
Canadians will really prove such Medes and Persians or 
such dogs in the manger I take leave to doubt. Mr. Bor- 
den, I noted, recently wrote to you asserting that Canada 
must have a voice in the affairs of the Empire. But is the 
Empire to have no corresponding voice in the affairs of 
Canada? Are the colonies always to put their own interests, 
or imagined interests, first, irrespective of how they embroil 
or disserve the Empire? From conversations within the 



454 THE WAR F0R THE WORLD 

last few days with leading British statesmen I find there 
is much sympathy with the magnanimous view of Mr. 
Jesse Collings that a Jewish colony would be at once an 
asset to the Empire and a vindication of its ancient quixotic 
tradition. But I feel sure that in whatever part of the 
Empire it was proposed to plant the colony a cry of agony 
and protest would go up. 

I am well aware that a Jewish colony in Australia or 
Canada could never reach the measure of autonomy pos- 
sible in a mere possession like East Africa. But under the 
general laws of the Commonwealth or the Dominion a new 
State could easily be carved out from the vast area of un- 
occupied territory. Canada and Australia are continents 
that have the misfortune or the modesty to mistake them- 
selves for countries. They apply to three million square 
miles conceptions that would be narrow for three hundred 
thousand. But three million square miles of homogeneous 
humanity have never yet afflicted our planet. Sir Wilfred 
Laurier himself belongs to the French section of Canada, 
and I pray that even Australia may escape the deadly 
monotony which is her fond and foolish dream. 

Yours obediently, 

Israel Zangwill. 



ENVOI 1 

Oliver Singing 

Oliver's singing 

Comes down to my study, 

As I sit in the twilight 

Poring the problem 

Of this battered old planet, 

This universe tragical, 

Bloodily twirling. 

Nearly all his small span 

And through both of his birthdays 

This senseless hell-fury, 

This horror has hurtled, 

Yet he lies in his cot, 

Happy, sleepy and singing. 

This — I muse — at the core 

Of our battered old planet, 

Something young and untainted, 

Something gay and undaunted, 

Like a bud in its whiteness, 

Like a bird in its joy, 

Through the foul-smelling darkness, 

Through the muck and the slaughter. 

Pushes steadily forward, 

Singing. 



Printed in the United States of America 
455 



'HE following pages contain advertisements of 
books by the same author or on kindred subjects 



" Of the original plays presented in London in 191 1 the finest 
was Mr. Israel Zangwill's ' The War God.' " — Pall Mall Gazette. 

The War God : A Tragedy in Five Acts 
By ISRAEL ZANGWILL 

Decorated cloth, i2tno, $1.25 
SOME EXPERT OPINIONS 

"A very great tragedy, full of genius. Its language moves in 
blank verse as the appropriate ritual of this momentous theme." 

— Mrs. Alice Meynell. 

"Mr. Zangwill is a man of genius. He has put on the stage a 
play which grapples with reality in its grimmest form. . . . 
The play is big with the fate of nations. . . . No play of our 
time cuts deeper into the flesh of reality." — Mr. James Douglas. 

"I admire the courage which led Mr. Zangwill to essay this 
task of high emprise. ... It is a play which the large audience 
followed with intense interest and discussed with great earnest- 
ness between the acts." — William T. Stead. 

"An extremely vigorous piece of work, full alike of thought 
and dramatic power." — Daily Telegraph. 



The Melting Pot 



By ISRAEL ZANGWILL 

Revised edition, cloth, i2mo, $1.25 
In this drama America is conceived as a melting pot in which 
the most diverse elements and unpromising material are fused 
into true citizens of the country of the future. The idea is worked 
out with the mastery of technique and the vigor of plot con- 
struction which have distinguished Mr. Zangwill's work in the 
past. It is probably the most eloquent representation of Jewish 
life and ideals in America that has ever been set before the 
people of this country. 

The Next Religion : A Play in Three Acts 

Cloth, i2mo, $1.25 

"He has rendered a service to his time by his beautiful play 

with its wealth of fine thought in fine language." — The Argonaut. 

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York 



By ISRAEL ZANGWILL 



Children of the Ghetto cioth, $i. 5 o 

"No matter what he may henceforth write, this book will 
stand alone as a classic of the Ghetto." — The Bookman. 



Ghetto Comedies cm, $1.50 

Each of these tales is deliriously amusing. There is a quiet 
laugh in every page — the keenest wit, the subtlest satire, a 
Heine-like sparkle, and never a sting. 

Ghetto Tragedies cioth, $1.50 

A new edition of the book first issued as "They that Walk 
in Darkness." "Ghetto Tragedies," says the Boston Herald, 
"torn from life and presented in their grim compelling force as 
no one else could write them . . . revealing dramatic force, 
intense realism, infinite pity, and certain knowledge." 

The King of Schnorrers cioth, $1.50 

"Its audacity is something unequalled, and it is enhanced by 
the pithy and original style in which the author writes." — Daily 

News. 



The Celibates' Club 



Cloth, $1.50 

"The Bachelors' Club" and the "Old Maids' Club" in one 
volume. "He has ideas," says the New York Sun, "and the 
art of sketching delicious situations in an original and charming 
way." 

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York 



Plaster Saints 



By ISRAEL ZANGWILL 

Author of "The Melting Pot," etc. 

Cloth, I2tno, $1.25 

In this play Mr. Zangwill attacks modern problems with 
characteristic force and originality. The scene is a provincial 
English town, the time the present, and the method of handling 
the theme the classical form. The central character in the 
action is a clergyman whose past life involves him in a series 
of incidents which give rise to several intensely dramatic epi- 
sodes. In their development and in the philosophy which Mr. 
Zangwill expresses through them there is much that is highly 
significant. 

"From Israel Zangwill one may always expect a ' strong ' play. 
He is invariably dynamic." — Chicago Post. 



OTHER BOOKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR 

Italian Fantasies 

Col., ill., i2mo, $2.00 

The Serio-Comic Governess 

Paper, i2mo, $.50 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York 



FOUR BOOKS ON OUR NATIONAL PROBLEMS 

The Forks of the Road 

By WASHINGTON GLADDEN 

50 cents 
Dr. Gladden points out the need for national advocacy of the 
cause of peace in America. 



The Heritage of Tyre 



By WILLIAM BROWN MELONEY 

50 cents 

A challenge to the patriotism of America as stirring in its 

way as Owen Wister's "The Pentecost of Calamity." 

The Pentecost of Calamity 

By OWEN WISTER 

50 cents 

"Not since Mercier, Archbishop of Malines, gave his now 

famous pastoral letter to the world, has more eloquence and 

truth been compressed into so small a space." 

Their True Faith and Allegiance 

By GUSTAVUS OHLINGER 

50 cents 

A historical discussion of foreign propaganda in America with 

definite constructive suggestions as to remedy. A strong plea 

for the Anglo-Saxon Ideal. 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York 



The Diplomacy of the Great War 

By ARTHUR BULLARD $i. 5 o 

"Easily the most interesting, and in some respects, the most 
valuable among the books dealing with the diplomatic history 
of Europe." — The Dial. 

"Entertaining and informing . . . well worth the study of 
all Americans who truly love their country." — N. Y. Times. 

What Is Coming? 

By H. G. WELLS $1.50 

Remembering Mr. Wells' almost uncanny success in some of 
his prophecies, this new volume of highly interesting forecasts 
is a work of large significance. 

The European Anarchy 

By G. LOWES DICKINSON $1.00 

A clear and concise description of the blind "system" of the 
European nations which has brought them into conflict. 

Leaves from a Field Note-Book 

By J. H. MORGAN $1.50 

Intimate sketches of the great war by one who was for five 
months at the front with the British Headquarters Staff. 

The Restoration of Europe 

By ALFRED FRIED 

A recent work by the famous German historian, outlining a 
simple and most feasible plan for a federation of Europe. 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York 



A Short History of Germany 

New edition, 2 vols. 
By ERNEST F. HENDERSON 

"In our opinion, for the English reader, there is no more 
admirable contribution to the history of Germany as a whole 
than in these volumes. The excellence of the text lies in its 
freedom from prejudice." — The Outlook. 

The German Empire Between Two 
Wars 

By ROBERT H. FIFE $1.50 

A study of the political and social development of the German 
nation between 1871 and 1914. 

Nationality in Modern History 

By J. HOLLAND ROSE $1.25 

A study of the varied manifestations of nationality among 
the chief European nations, supplying a view of the background 
of the great conflict. 

The Things Men Fight For 

By H. H. POWERS 

A plea for the larger vision, for recognition of the fact that 
the things men fight for are universal and not national. 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 




007 033 225 5 



■ 



